‘Asked him for a few minutes, ended up speaking for 4 hours’, Jemimah Rodrigues recalls meeting Virat Kohli

Jemimah Rodrigues opened up on her interaction with Virat Kohli at a cafe.

Virat Kohli | GettyVeteran India batter Virat Kohli has left a massive impact on the game with his leadership, fitness and obviously a number of match-winning performances.

Not only the Indian youngsters, but the budding cricketers around the world idolize Virat and aspire to become like him.

In fact, Kohli has been a mentor to a lot of youngsters and numerous cricketers have shared their experience of getting benefitted by the advice from the former India skipper.

Recently, Indian women’s cricketer Jemimah Rodrigues recalled an incident about her and teammate Smriti Mandhana meeting Kohli at a hotel cafe in New Zealand.

"Smriti and I had the opportunity to talk to him. We had asked him 'we want to speak to you Virat bhaiya about batting. Can we meet?'. We were in the same hotel in New Zealand. He was like 'yeah sure, come'. So he called us at the cafe and Anushka Sharma was also there. We had asked him for just a few minutes but we ended up speaking for four hours. We spoke half an hour about batting but after that it was just normal things," Rodrigues said on 'The Ranveer Show'.

The 21-year-old also opened up on the piece of advice she received from Kohli.

"A lot of things were spoken. We spoke a lot about batting so I think I am privileged like that. I get to meet such people. At the right time, we met them and they've actually inspired me and helped me at that phase I was in," Rodrigues added.

"I asked him about how to handle expectations. I told him 'You are Virat Kohli. If you've scored a fifty, it's like you have underperformed for people. So how do you handle that expectation?' He said 'for me everytime I am out there on the field, I just look at the scoreboard and just focus on it. Do that and don't focus on crowd and what I can do to help India win. If I stop giving these expectations importance, and just look at the process, the results will automatically follow'."

Notably, Virat Kohli was recently given a bio-bubble break to freshen up and, thus, he didn’t feature in the last T20I against West Indies last month and the subsequent T20I series against Sri Lanka.

Kohli is set to return to action in the two-match Test series against Sri Lanka, starting March 4 in Mohali.

 
 

By Salman Anjum - 01 Mar, 2022

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