Former India player Gautam Gambhir feels everyone are overly critical of Virat Kohli sometimes. However, Kohli scored 45 off 76 deliveries on Day 1 of the first Test against Sri Lanka. While playing his 100th Test, Kohli got off the mark by getting a leading edge over cover while trying to play a delivery from Lasith Embuldeniya to the leg side and he was eventually removed by the same bowler before scoring a fifty.

While discussing this on Star Sports, Gambhir said: “At times we are too critical of Virat Kohli because even if he plays one bad shot, we say lapse in concentration. If you talk about the start, every player is nervous, not only Virat; the greatest players in the world are nervous, especially when you are playing your 100th Test.”

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Gautam Gambhir again explained: “Here there was a misjudgment of length. The same deliveries he was playing on the front foot before this, and nothing was happening. He played back, the ball spun a little, and he got beaten, but before that, the sort of batting he did, he was in absolute control.”

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“I don’t think so. I feel if you play a full delivery off the back foot, you give that much time for the delivery to spin. When you play the same ball off the front foot, the ball does not get that much chance to turn. If he had been playing on the leg side, the bat’s face might have been more closed. It was not that closed here. If you see the ball, it pitched on the middle stump, and hit the edge of the off-stump, so it did not turn that much. So it was just a misjudgment of length; he should have played this ball off the front foot,” Gautam Gambhir concluded.