In 2008, a young man Virat Kohli joined Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) for the very first time, at that time dressing room was honoured with great cricketers like Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble, but Kholi was being more impressed by the one player who was Mark Boucher from South Africa.
During RCB’s podcast, Kohli said boldly that Boucher “stunned him” with the discussion he had with him. Boucher told Kohli about his deficiencies and helped him to work on them.
“Out of all the players that I played with initially, Mark Boucher had the biggest impact on me as a young kid,” Kohli said. “He was the only guy I saw who came with the mind-set that ‘Okay, I’m going to come in and help some of the young Indian players.”
“He saw me play and saw a bit of potential. He figured out what my weaknesses could be, like “if I wanted to go to the next level, this is what I need to do, without me asking him anything”. He said, ‘Okay, I’ve seen you play this and we need to work on this, that, and a couple more things.’ So he took me to the nets, he said, ‘You need to work on the short ball. No one’s going to give you a chance in international cricket if you can’t pull the ball.’
“He was hitting these tennis balls at me at a pace where I was like, if this is what it’s going to take, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it to the next level. But he really kept at it. I started becoming better. I remember a game we were playing in Chennai or Kolkata, and he told me, ‘When I come to commentate in India in four years from now, if I don’t see you playing for India, you would do a disservice to yourself.’ “He really stunned me with the conversations that he had with me. And that really pushed me in the direction where I said I needed to start looking at how I could keep becoming better.”
Later in 2008, Kohli played his first international debut match in Sri Lanka. He joined the team instead of Sachin Tendulkar, who was not playing because of some complaint. But when he joined back, there was no spot for Kholi in the team.
Kohli was well aware that he was not the “most technically sound” batter but he always learned to improve and get better, which helped him to make his place stronger in the game. During 2009, Yuvraj Singh got injured just ahead of the Champions Trophy, where Kholi got a great chance to be part of the team, where he was asked to join the team just before their opening match, which was against Pakistan in Centurion.
“That was my first India-Pakistan game. I scored about 16. I tried to hit Shahid Afridi for a six straight down the ground and got caught at long-on [long-off], and we lost that game. It was an important moment in the game. And my heart was beating so fast through the whole innings. I could not process everything that happened within those four days.”
