Former England Captain Michael Vaughan has praised India's best batsman Virat Kohli for playing an innings "right up there as one of the best" knocks in modern day Test match cricket. Virat's gritty and disciplined effort got him a magnificent 149 on Day 2 of the first Test at Edgbaston and ensured that he singlehandedly keep his team alive in the game. 

Vaughan was quoted telling BBC Test Match Special as, "The last session was very similar to last night's session where India gave just grab the game back through brilliance from Kohli. That one person I know in the England dressing room (who'll be disappointed) is Dawid Malan, who dropped Virat Kohli. It was as easy as they come at second slip, Whatever happens in this game they've allowed Virat Kohli to go on and get 149. He's got 15 more in this innings than he got throughout the whole tour last time he was here in 2014."

"Virat has found confidence. It was an incredible innings. He probably realised when the seventh wicket fell, every time he goes out to bat, that the shoulders of the whole team is with him. The way he manoeuvred the ball into the gaps, the way that he played at the swinging ball, he hung in there, hung in there and got about 57, His body language just changed, he knows that he has to try and hit the boundary. He hit the ball through mid-wicket off Sam Curran that raced to the boundary and took him into the 60s and I thought 'wait a minute, there's a bit of a danger here'. If one of the tail-enders can hang around, you know there's going to be an issue."

Vaughan also thinks that tactically England couldn't have done anything differently and praisingly, further said, "Wonderful batting. Tactically, you look at England and people will say 'why didn't they spread the field'. It's so difficult as a captain to know what to do. Do you go short, do you go wide? And if you bring the field up, he could hit more boundaries, A doff of the hat is sometimes that you can do as an opponent and when it is his (Kohli's) day, you just need to sit back and admire."

"Sometimes you just have to respect that someone's played incredibly, It's right up there with one of the best Test match innings that you can see, because of the context of the game. You look at the next highest scorer for India, it's 26 and he's gone and got 149. 92 for the last two wickets in which [Ishant] Sharma and [Umesh Yadav] contributed six. So that tells you pretty much everything."

Reiterating the likelihood of India's best batsman having a very fruitful series from now on, Vaughan concluded, "It's a five-match series and Virat has got off to a flier, a flier with 149. Great players, once they get into a rhythm, once they get into form and once they get into confidence, they're sometimes very difficult to stop. Great players love the stage and he went out there today, the crowd booed him. He's great because he looks around goes 'alright then, you boo me I'll hang around and make your team spend a bit more time in the field."

(Inputs from Cricbuzz)