It’s not easy being Virat Kohli. He’s widely regarded as one of the finest batters to have played the game, arguably the greatest across formats of the current era, but to be the player he has become today, it’s taken a lot of self-discipline overcoming unique challenges including the weight of expectations to score big every time he steps out to bat for India.
In Ahmedabad against Australia, Kohli ended his wait for a Test century with a fine 186 to put India in control. It was his first hundred in the format after November 2019 and for his superlative effort, he was also chosen as player-of-the-match.
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In a chat with head coach Rahul Dravid after the fourth Test ended on Monday, Kohli revealed how everyone he comes across before during matchday expects him to score a hundred and that does play on his mind.
“If I have to be brutally honest, it does become a little complicated and difficult because the moment you step out of the hotel room, right from the guy outside the room to the guy in the lift to the bus drivers, everyone wants says ‘we want a hundred.’ So it does play on your mind all the time,” Kohli told Dravid in an interview on Bcci.tv.
“But that’s the beauty of playing cricket for so long as well, to have these complications come up and to overcome these challenges and then it comes together nicely like it did in this game, then that gives you an extra gust of air to go beyond and further and start enjoying the cricket a lot more,” he added.
For India and Kohli the century has come at the right time. In a couple of months time, they will be traveling to England for the final of the ICC World Test Championship where they face Australia.
“I am just happy that it happened at the right time just before the World Test Championship final, and I will definitely be going there very relaxed and very excited man,” Kohli said.
It took Kohli 41 innings between scoring his 27th and 28th Test century and he admits to have gotten a little frustrated during that period.
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“To be honest, I have led the complications to grow on me a little bit because of my own shortcomings. I think the desperation to get that three-figure mark is something that can grow on you as a batsman and we have all experienced that in some stage or the other,” he said.
Kohli recalled how he was questioning himself after repeated failures to not being able to stitch big innings despite having done so frequently in the past.
“I led that happen to me to a certain extent but also the flip side to it is that I am not a guy who is happy with forty and forty-fives. I have always been someone who takes a lot of pride in performing for the team. It’s not like Virat Kohli should stand out. It’s like when I am batting on 40 I know I can get a 150 here and that will help my team. So that was eating me a lot: Why I am not able to get that big score for the team is because I always took pride in the fact that when the team needed me I would step up and perform in different conditions and situations. The fact that I was not able to do that bothered me,” he said.
With 75 centuries, Kohli is second on the list of players with most number of international centuries but the former India captain says personal milestones have never been a goal of his.
“Not so much the milestone as such because I never played for the milestones. A lot of people asked me this question how do you keep scoring hundreds and I always told them ‘A hundred is something that happens along the way within my goal, which is to bat as long as possible for the team and get as many runs as possible for the team’. So the milestone is never my focus,” he said.
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