Former India skipper Virat Kohli dominated cricket in all formats in every country, but his record in England, in Tests, was not upto the mark given his talent and penchant for scoring big runs until the 2018 tour.
Everyone remembers his horror tour of England in 2014 where he scored 1, 8, 25, 0, 39, 28, 0, 7, 6, and 20 in five Tests, for an average of 13.50 in 10 innings in 5 Tests. Kohli also talked about calling Sachin Tendulkar for help after this debacle.
He roared back to form in the Australia tour that season, scoring 692 runs in 4 Tests, including twin centuries in Adelaide Test, which was his first as India captain.
Then during the England tour of 2018, Virat Kohli laid the demons of 2014 to rest, by scoring a scintillating century in Edgbaston.
Recently on season 2 of the RCB podcast, Virat Kohli recalled how he was welcomed to the crease by the Edgbaston crowd in 2018. He remembers how 35,000 strong crowd in the ground booed him.
“My heart was pumping because all I could think of was the flashes of 2014. I walked in and there were about 35,000 people at the stadium and they all started booing the moment I entered the field. My heart started beating faster. They have this amazing ability to create an environment where you feel like I have got no chance here,” recalled Kohli.
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On the 2018 tour of England, Virat Kohli was in sublime form, despite India losing the Test series, as he was the top run-scorer with an impressive 593-run tally with two centuries and three fifties to his name.
“I remember James Anderson was the guy running with the ball, and I was like, what are the odds here I am facing the first ball from him again after four years. In my mind, I was like ‘please just play the first ball and he bowled it at the fourth stump and I left that ball’. I became calm after that first ball and then I got dropped at 22. I could have got out on 22 in that innings but I got 149 and I didn’t look back from there, so that’s when you realized that you just can’t sit there and crib about things that didn’t go right. There are a lot of things that went right. So much weight was lifted from my shoulder,” he said.
“I was going to play county cricket before the 2018 series. I was a bit nervous because I thought I needed to prepare more. But then I had a neck issue in 2018 I fell ill in one of the IPL games and I could not go there because It aggravated,” he added.
He also said that talking to his RCB teammate AB de Villiers calmed him down before the 2018 tour of England.
“I remember AB telling me at that time. I spoke to him that I am feeling a bit jittery because I am not able to go and play in the county. He said this is not 2014, and you are not the same player. You would be absolutely fine. I became very calm after that,” he said.
Virat also accepted what exactly went wrong for him in the 2014 tour, and he failed so miserably.
“Before going to England in 2014, I had a good series at home against New Zealand. I scored a century and a 70. I was high on confidence. When we went to England in 2014, I thought I needed to prove myself here but was wrong in the first place. Because I went there to prove something that I can play in these conditions and not go there to kind of make my team win, that wasn’t my focal point. My main aim was to I need to prove that I can play here. I was always under pressure. And once things went back I was not able to find a way to get out of that. It was a very bad phase,” he said.
Kohli recalled how after that England tour, he was kept reminded about his failure even after he went on to score across the globe.
“From 2014 to 2018, I did everything everywhere in the world and performed in every condition. But people just held on to one thing ‘Ohh but what about England’. That’s when I realized that probably I played cricket at a level that I am certainly very proud of. I have won so many games for the team, but people are constantly looking at things that have not gone right,” he said.
(Indian Express inputs)
