Former India player Aakash Chopra has added that Virat Kohli potentially retired from Tests due to mental burnout. He shared that Kohli played the game with great intensity and might have felt that he could not maintain that for five days any longer as well. However, Kohli announced his retirement from Test cricket through a social media post on Monday, May 12. He will only represent India in the ODI format, considering he had already retired from T20Is after the 2024 T20 World Cup campaign as well.
In a video shared on his YouTube channel ‘Aakash Chopra’, he said, “He played Test cricket with the intensity of T20s. He ran a marathon at the speed of a sprint and kept running, and that is absolutely insane. As a batter, you can put all your effort into fielding, but he used to run all over the ground, celebrate every wicket, lift someone, or make someone fall.”
“If not, he was messing with the crowd and driving them. This is mad intensity. It’s one of its kind. We won’t get to see such intensity again, nor did we find it before him. I remember VVS Laxman saying that Virat has many good things, but he fears that intensity might burn out. So maybe it was a mental burnout, that he cannot do this for five days anymore,” he further added.
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Meanwhie, Aakash Chopra praised Virat Kohli for excelling across all three formats, saying that other modern batting greats like Steve
Smith, Joe Root and Kane Williamson haven’t been as successful as him as well.
“There will never be another player like Virat Kohli. He is a three-format master. Where do you get three-format masters now? If you see the Fab Four, none of them is playing all three formats well. If you see the upcoming generation, you see that someone is good in one format, but not in the other,” he said.
“You have anyway started making format-specific teams, and going forward, it will happen a lot more. Virat Kohli has captained and scored runs in T20s. He has the status of the best ever in ODI cricket, and has scored more than 9000 runs in Test cricket. You won’t find such dominance. I think he is the last of this generation,” Aakash Chopra concluded.
