Despite the fact that the Indian skipper Virat Kohli never shies away from having a banter on the field after being a captain, in his early days in international cricket, Virat was often termed as arrogant for is behavior. Over the years there have been a plethora of controversies involving Kohli when he too his early steps in international cricket and in an interview with Wisden Cricket Monthly, he revealed that he would rather forget the incident from 2012 when he was caught on camera showing the middle finger to fans.
Recalling the incident, Virat said, “The one thing I remember most is when I’d had enough of the Australian crowd at Sydney [in 2012] and I just decided to flick a [middle] finger at them. ‘I’m so cool’. The match referee [Ranjan Madugalle] called me to his room the next day and I’m like, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘What happened at the boundary yesterday?’ I said, ‘Nothing, it was a bit of banter’. Then he threw the newspaper in front of me and there was this big image of me flicking on the front page and I said, ‘I’m so sorry, please don’t ban me!’ I got away with that one. He was a nice guy, he understood I was young and these things happen.”
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Kohli further added that in his younger days he did a lot of stuff that of which he can now laugh about but he is proud about the fact that he didn’t try to change himself because of any of that. He was pretty happy with who he was. He also gave credit to is coach Rajkumar Sharma for the role he has played in shaping his career as he reckons that the same is now helping him to do his duty to guide the youngsters in the team.
Virat elaborated, “My coach, Rajkumar Sharma, was always looking at things from the outside and he understood me the most after my family because I had interacted him so much over the years. My family as well. Every time they felt like I was not on the right path they told me. If I was doing something wrong he would make sure that he got that across, one way or the other. He was the only person I was scared of when I was growing up. I went into his academy when I was nine and even now I still speak to him about my game.”
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The Indian skipper is happy about the fact that he gets to guide the young guys in the team to not make the same mistakes that probably he made when he was their age.
Kohli concluded by expressing the pleasure he gets while stopping someone from committing a mistake, he said, “If I see someone making the same mistakes that I committed and I cannot correct them, then it’s my failure. If I choose to stay quiet I’m not really doing my job. You don’t want to suffocate anyone but the mistakes I made early in my career, I would not like to see youngsters make them more than once, because that’s just wasting such an important phase of their lives and careers.”
