Former India skipper Virat Kohli seems to have got his moo back in the Asia Cup 2022 as he is playing with renewed energy and vigour after a month-long break. He has turned back the clock with a couple of brilliant half-centuries in the continental tournament. Kohli was struggling to score runs in the IPL 2022 and then the England tour before being rested from the West Indies and Zimbabwe series.
After getting some runs under his belt in the first match, Virat Kohli was seen playing majestic drives and swift running between the wickets. After an unbeaten half-century against Hong Kong, Kohli looked a little more aggressive against Pakistan in the super our clash as he took a little more risks and wanted to play aggressively.
Speaking at the post-match press conference, Virat Kohli said, “Today I was making a conscious effort to strike at a higher pace. When we lost wickets, there was communication and our plans changed, where I had to bat till the 18th over with (Deepak) Hooda. If there were a couple of batters, I would’ve gone with the same tempo and tried to hit more boundaries or sixes.”
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He further explained, “But again, I ended up being in a situation where I had to go deep. Because after Hooda and me, it was Bhuvi (Bhuvneshwar Kumar), so the bowlers were to follow. That makes a bit of a difference, but we do possess the skills to analyse the situation and play accordingly as well.”
Virat Kohli after the match mentioned that India is looking to improve their run-rate in the middle-overs and echoed skipper Rohit Sharma’s sentiments that sometimes it might not come off but this is what they want to do and have been able to achieve what they want more often than not.
ormer Indian skipper explained, “If you’ve seen the way we’ve been playing, it’s given us the results we need, and in our middle overs, the run rate has also improved. It’s something I, as a batsman, really took keen notice of, and I knew that is one area we need to keep improving on. We’ve spoken about this that sometimes it won’t come off, the way you want and today, we lost a few wickets in the middle phase which didn’t allow us to go towards the 200 target.”
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Virat Kohli conlcued, “But given the situation, if we had a couple of wickets in hand, we could’ve got more runs. We’re not disturbed by losing wickets through the middle overs, because that’s the way we want to play. We want to be able to get those 20-25 extra runs that can eventually make the difference in big games.”
India was restricted to 181, which was 10-15 runs less as Pakistan chased them down with 5 wickets remaining.
