Virat Kohli brought relief to cricket fans across the globe by scoring his 28th Test century in the fourth and final Test match of the India-Australia series at Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi Stadium. This was Kohli’s first three-figure score in the longest format of the game since November 2019.
1204 days passed between Kohli’s 27th and 28th Test tons, with him last reaching the milestone in the longest format of the game during a pink-ball Test match between India and Bangladesh at Kolkata’s Eden Gardens. After his marathon knock of 186 against Australia, Kohli admitted to his frustration at not performing to his capability in a “brutally honest’ chat with head coach Rahul Dravid.
“I know you are someone who takes a lot of pride in his performance and has that habit of scoring 100 regularly. I know there was COVID, so, not a lot of Test matches but has it been hard not to have scored a Test hundred (for this long)? I know we get a little obsessed with numbers. I’ve loved seeing some of the other innings. Even the 70 in Cape Town was a really good innings. But has (not scoring a hundred) been at the back of your mind?,” Darvid asked Kohli in a chat with BCCI.TV.
“Honestly, I’ve let the complications grow on me a bit because of my shortcomings. The desperation to get to the three-figure mark is something that can grow on you as a batsman. I let that happen to me to a certain extent. But a flip side to it is, I’m not a guy who is happy with 40-45. I take a lot of pride in performing for the team. It’s not like when Virat Kohli should stand out. When I’m batting on 40, I know I can get a 150. That was eating me up a lot. Why am I not able to get that big score for the team? Because I took pride in the fact that when the team needed me, I stood up, scoring in difficult conditions. The fact that I wasn’t able to do that, was bothering me,” Kohli replied in a candid manner.
Kohli further spilled the secret of his incredible ability to make centuries on a whim by explaining how the milestones just happen because of his goal of helping the team. However, he admitted that things like these do play on his mind, as people constantly keep reminding him about them.
“It was never about the milestones. A lot of people ask me, ‘how do you keep scoring those hundreds’. And I always say a hundred is something that happens along the way within my goal, which is to bat as long as possible for my team. But yeah, if I’m brutally honest, it does become a little difficult as the moment you step out of the hotel room, right from the guy outside, to the guy in the lift, the bus driver everyone is saying ‘we want a hundred’. So, it does play on your mind all the time but that’s also the beauty of playing for so long to have these complications come up and overcome these challenges,” Kohli concluded.
