“I still got it,” he said, and then realizing he was in front of a camera, tempered it with, “I guess.”
Virat Kohli has often said he has nothing to prove but the fact that he said that up there at the end of the last match suggests there has been talk about the way he bats in T20 cricket.
Usually cricketers don’t get riled up by talk that comes from outside (fans, critics, media). That’s white noise and they spend their whole lives ignoring it, hard though it certainly is.
Kohli saying he’s still got it feels like there’s some input from within the Indian team about how they want him to go about his business and he has taken that fully on board because his 77 in the last match was full of some very un-Kohli like shots, where he took risks from the get-go. He put a much lower price on his wicket than he usually does, so much so that he could’ve been out for 0 had a catch been taken.
This will be a fresh test because Kohli likes pace on the ball and in Narine, Chakravarthy and Suyash, he’s not going to get a lot of it. Can he still be gung-ho when he has to make the peace? When does he have to play mystery spin?
