Virat Kohli experienced “the most intense kind of disappointment” in their recent tour to Australia. He said that he felt the same experience back in summer 2014, where he played 10 innings and couldn’t even score a single half century, during their tour of England.
Kohli was disheartened about his performance during the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, just comparing to England tour many years ago. During the Trophy, Kohli started the series with an excellent century resulting in India’s win in Perth, but remaining eight games of that series he couldn’t manage to stay on crease for a long time. At the end, he only made 190 runs in nine innings at an average of 23.75.
“If you ask me the intensity of how disappointed I’ve been, the most recent Australia tour would be the one that’s most fresh. So it might feel the most intense to me.” Kohli said at an event moderated by Isa Guha at the RCB Innovation Lab Indian Sports Summit in Bengaluru.
“For a long time, the tour of England in 2014 bothered me the most. But I can’t look at it that way. I might not have an Australia tour again in four years. I don’t know. You have to make peace with whatever’s happened in your life. In 2014, I still had the chance to go in 2018 and do what I did. It might not have been the case. It might have been another blunder. But it didn’t turn out that way.”
“So, there’s no such guarantees in life. I think when you are at a stage for a long period of time, when you perform, people get used to your performances. They start feeling for you more than you feel sometimes. This has to be corrected.”
Kohli expressed the challenges which he faced in Australia, where due to less score he tried to make things better in every innings he played. Still he learned the feeling of disappointment before rushing to decision making.
“Once you start taking on the energy and the disappointment from the outside, then you start burdening yourself way more,” Kohli added. “And then you start thinking about things, like ‘I’ve got two or three days left on this tour, I need to make an impact now.’ And you start getting more desperate. That’s something I’ve surely experienced in Australia as well.”
“Because I got a good score in the first Test. I thought, right, ‘let’s go.’ There’s going to be another big series for me. It doesn’t turn out that way. For me, it’s just about the acceptance of, ‘okay fine, this is what happened. I’m going to be honest with myself. Where do I want to go? What are my energy levels like?”
“I’m not sitting here in 48 hours or 72 hours-time to make a decision like ‘let me go.’ Spend time with family. Just sit down. Let everything calm down. And see how I feel in a few days. And within five-six days I was excited to go to the gym. I was like, okay fine. It’s all good. I don’t need to tweet anything right now.”
