Virat Kohli is known as India’s most successful Test captain not just for his batting but for his exceptional ability to motivate and extract the best from every player. Whether inspiring Mohammed Shami before the Cape Town Test in 2018 or delivering his legendary “60 overs of hell” speech, Kohli knew precisely how to strike the right chord with his teammates. However, Ishant Sharma, a veteran India pacer, recently disclosed an incident where Kohli’s intense motivation backfired despite such occurrences being rare.
Kohli made his debut as India’s Test captain in the 2014-15 Border-Gavaskar Trophy’s Adelaide Test when MS Dhoni was sidelined with a broken thumb. After Dhoni retired from Tests in 2015, Kohli took over full-time, leading India on their Sri Lanka tour. During the third Test in Colombo, a series of confrontations involving Ishant and Sri Lankan players prompted the ICC to impose sanctions.
Ishant described the episode: “During the 2015 Sri Lanka Test series, Dhammika Prasad was bowling bouncers at me. I took a single and as I reached the non-striker’s end, I told him, ‘You are too slow to hit me on the head.’ That’s where it started. We kept going back-and-forth until suddenly, Dinesh Chandimal came from third man and elbowed me. In the heat of the moment, Ashwin got out, and I ran back to the dressing room to change my shoes. While I was doing that, I noticed Ravi Shastri and Sri Lanka’s manager leaving the room. They thought Dhammika and I had fought, but Dhammika followed me into the Indian dressing room.” Ishant shared this on the Raj Shamani podcast.
He continued, “Virat knows how to rile me up. I wasn’t aware at first. Then Virat told me, ‘Woh tere peeche tujhe maarne aa gaya, aur tune kuch nahi kiya? Dhammika Prasad tujhe maarne aaya tha’ (He came all the way to beat you, and you didn’t do anything). He showed me the clip where Chandimal elbowed me, and I swear, I went mad. I’m usually not that aggressive, but that day my protective mode kicked in. By then, my match fee had already been deducted. I went out to bowl, took three wickets, celebrated on their faces and got banned.”
Result
As a result, both Ishant and Chandimal were handed one-match bans, while Dhammika Prasad and Lahiru Thirimanne were fined half their match fees. Ishant’s ban, which gave him two suspension points, ruled him out of the first Test against South Africa in Mohali in November. Despite the tough consequences, Kohli viewed the incident in a different light. “I was very happy with the incident when he was batting because it happened at the right time for us. We had to bowl yesterday, and they made him angry. It couldn’t have happened at a better time. The timing was perfect, and everything fell in place regarding aggression. He bowled in the second innings without conceding a boundary for 19 overs. That’s the kind of pressure he created on the batsmen because of one incident. So it had to be controlled, but ultimately it benefited us,” Kohli explained.
