The 2023 edition of the Indian Premier League will kick off on Friday, March 31, and on the third day, Virat Kohli’s Royal Challengers Bangalore will open their campaign. The star-studded RCB will face the five-time champion Mumbai Indians in their opening match, which will take place at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru on Sunday (April 2). The Bengaluru-based side is still waiting for its first IPL title, and this time the team would like to end the title drought.
Ahead of the start of the 16th season of the cash-rich league, RCB’s star batter and former captain Virat Kohli has fired a big warning to opposition teams by saying that even though he is back to playing the way he used to, there’s still a lot of room for him to get to his best, which he hopes to happen during the upcoming edition.
Speaking in a video uploaded by RCB’s Twitter account, the 34-year-old cricketer who stepped down from RCB’s captaincy after the conclusion of IPL 2021 said, “It was just about rediscovering the love for the game. That could happen when I stepped away from what was happening on the field for so long. I was trying to find ways when I was exhausted. I needed to connect with myself as a human first, not judge myself constantly or keep myself under scrutiny all the time. Staying away from the game helped me. That helped me rediscover my excitement and love for the game. When I came back, everything was an opportunity; there was no pressure.”
“The results followed. I was able to play well in T20Is, ODIs, and recently in the Test series as well. I’m back to playing the way I do; there’s still a lot of room to get to my best, which hopefully happens in the IPL if I get to the level I really want to play at. That would help the team,” Kohli added.
The right-handed batter, who has scored one century at least in all three formats of the game in the last seven months, is the leading run scorer in IPL history. In the last 15 years of the IPL, he has played a total of 223 matches, in which he has scored 6624 runs at an average of 36.20.
