Star India batter Virat Kohli has opened up on his career, captaincy, batting and most importantly why he left the leadership role. The constant pressure of leading India and RCB for nearly a decade and the scrutiny around his batting “became too much in the end” for him. However, he stepped down from captaincy to be in a “happy space”. Notably, Kohli resigned as T20 captain after the World Cup in 2021, following which he also left RCB’s leadership role. A year later, he quit Test captaincy as well.
“At one point, it did become tough for me because there was just too much happening in my career. I was captaining India for a period of 7-8 years. I captained RCB for nine years. There were expectations on me from a batting perspective every game that I played,” said Kohli in an ‘RCB Bold Diaries’ podcast. “I didn’t have this sense that the attention was off me. If it wasn’t captaincy, it would be batting. I was exposed to it 24×7. It did get very tough on me, and it did get too much in the end.” Kohli, who also took a month-long break from cricket in 2022 and did not touch a bat during that phase, added that a time had come in his life when he was struggling to be happy in the spotlight.”
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“That’s why I stepped down because I felt like if I’ve decided I want to be in this place, I need to be happy. I need to have a space in my life where I can just come and play my cricket without being judged, without being looked at as what are you going to do this season and what’s going to happen now,” said Virat Kohli.
Leading India to the U19 World Cup title win does not guarantee one a direct entry into the senior team, and Kohli said that it was his determination and the backing of the then captain MS Dhoni and coach Gary Kirsten, who helped him secure the No. 3 batting position as well.
“I was very realistic about my abilities. Because I had seen a lot of other people play. And I did not feel like my game was anywhere close to theirs. The only thing that I had was determination. And if I wanted to make my team win, I was willing to do anything. That was the very reason I got chances to play for India initially. And Gary (Kirsten) and MS (Dhoni) made it very clear to me that we are backing you to play at number three.” Virat Kohli further added.
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“This is what you can do for the team. What you represent on the field, your energy, your engagement, is of the biggest value to us. We want you to play that way. So, I was never looked at as this outright match winner who can change the game from anywhere. But I had this thing, I’m going to stay in the fight. I’m not going to give up. And that is what they backed,” he shared.
“What happens when you’re young is you feel like, ‘if I have scored X amount of runs by the time I’m this age or whatever’, things will ease out. It never happens like that. And that is the marker actually. When you stop feeling that nervousness or that anticipation of how things are going to unfold is when people say that you’re done. So that never goes away from you because that very energy is what keeps you engaged to do what you need to do in that moment, in that present moment,” Virat Kohli concluded.
