The list of controversies involving Virat Kohli and Gautam Gambhir seems to be never-ending, especially as far as the Indian Premier League is concerned. With their personalities being pretty aggressive, the whole rivalry was first sparked off during the 2013 IPL contest between Royal Challengers Bangalore and Kolkata Knight Riders—in which Kohli led the former and Gambhir the latter.
The aggression revisited during the 2023 IPL season when RCB took on Lucknow Super Giants, for whom Gambhir was the mentor. With so much bad blood in the past, things took an interesting turn when Gambhir became the Head Coach of the Indian cricket team. It essentially meant that Gambhir and Kohli would be part of the same dressing room.
Their apparent patch-up had come to the public eye when the two were seen hugging each other and engaging in a long conversation during the 2024 edition of the IPL. However, former New Zealand cricketer Scott Styris believes that this might be tested in real-time.
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“Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it’s wait and see. I don’t think anyone can sit here and say it’s gonna work that well or it’s not gonna work. I think both players will just have to bite their tongue a little bit and observe and watch the way that, in Virat’s case, watch the way Gautam is looking to run the team and Gautam will be looking for Virat’s leadership to help all the younger players,” Scott Styris was quoted as saying by India Today.
“So there’s so much that we don’t know about that relationship and how it’s going to operate in a team with two different players having two different levels of power in that group as well. So I think they’re both. Firstly, they’re both terrific cricketers. They both have very good cricket brains. I think they’d both be smart enough to work out a way where it can be beneficial to the team and their performances,” he added.
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While Suryakumar Yadav was appointed as the new T20I captain and took time to get the team to a 2-0 lead in a three-match series as the team gets ready for the ODI series in Sri Lanka, for Gambhir, too, this series was the first assignment as head coach, and the former opener has done reasonably well thus far. Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli announced retirement from T20Is and arrived in Sri Lanka on July 29 to get ready for the forthcoming ODI series.
