You couldn’t be more wrong.
Talent plays a huge part in sport. In fact, it plays a huge part in every field. You cannot become a good doctor without having a high IQ and a good memory, and you cannot become a ground breaking physicist with a low IQ no matter how hard you study.
If someone doesn’t have talent for batting, he can become a decent amateur or even a club player through hard work, but he will never become a world class international player. You cannot reach the top purely on hard work.
What hard work does is that it supplements your talent. Talent alone will help you rise through the junior and amateur ranks, but you will be exposed at the top level if you don’t put in the hard yards to complement the talent. For example, look at Umar Akmal. When he competed against less talented players in Lahore he dominated them, but when he competed against talented and hard working players in the international circuit, he couldn’t excel.
It is easy for someone like Kohli to say that there is no such thing as talent and it is all hard work because he is talented. You can control your hard work but you cannot control your talent. Since you cannot see or feel talent, a talented person usually doesn’t realize that it actually exists, since he thinks that everyone is like them and the only difference is the hard work.
Ask about talent from the hundreds of batsmen in India who work as hard as Kohli but are nowhere near the Indian team, simply because they don’t have the talent that Kohli has. However, as I said, to become the best in the world, you need both talent and hard work.
Smith is actually outrageously talented. He has a unreal gift for hand-eye coordination which is second to none. He would have been a brilliant player at other sports where hand-eye coordination is dominant. For example, golf, tennis, ping pong, badminton etc.
Look at de Villiers. He excelled not only at cricket but also at golf, swimming, tennis, hockey and rugby. He could have been a national level professional in any of these sports. How much did do you think he had to work hard for all these sports? He was simply a naturally gifted athlete and that gave him an edge in all sports including cricket, where he worked hard to supplement his talent.
However, if both players have talent and even if that talent is not equal, then the lesser talented player can surpass the more talented one by working harder. Of course, if there is daylight between the talents, then the hard work will not make the difference as I explained above.
For example, if Rahul has a talent factor of 90% and Babar has a talent factor of 80%, then Babar can definitely become the better batsman by working harder on his game. Perhaps that is what is happening already, maybe Rahul isn’t working as hard as he should be.
Having watched both players play from the beginning, I firmly believe that Rahul has more natural ability, just like Rohit has more natural ability than Kohli. Rahul has an incredible talent for striking the ball, but Babar is better than him in terms of technique and temperament, something that he has built over the years by working had.
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