interview of a famous cricket player
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In an exclusive interview, Virat Kohli reflects on his experiences this year, and reveals how he manages an elite career and a commercial profile under intense public scrutiny.After producing some of the best cricket of his life in 2016, Indian batsman Virat Kohli is back up the order to number three in SportsPro's list of the world's most marketable athletes. In an exclusive interview, he reflects on his experiences this year, and reveals how he manages an elite career and a commercial profile under intense public scrutiny.
Cricket, especially batting, is about timing – and time. Fractions of seconds build one after another into long, decisive passages. On one level, winning is about negotiating each momentary judgement and managing the extended periods better than the opposition.
Virat Kohli’s time is now, and his timing could hardly be better. A fixture in the Indian national team for several years now, he is a batsman of classical gifts but one attuned to the tempo of the modern game.
In 2016, however, he has evolved into a player who may now be out on his own as the best in the world – though he personally reserves that accolade for AB de Villiers, his South African teammate at the Indian Premier League’s (IPL) Royal Challengers Bangalore. Though he is India’s Test captain, and an avowed defender of that lengthy old format, it is in the three-hour bursts of Twenty20 that he has played the bulk of his cricket this year, plundering runs in such quantities that some have wondered aloud if he might become the best limited-overs batsman of all time.
Earlier this year, India staged the ICC World Twenty20 for the first time. Kohli blitzed his home tournament, scoring heavily throughout and turning in particularly memorable performances in spookily composed chases against rivals Pakistan and Australia. Unfortunately for him, and the hosts, the rest of India’s much-vaunted outfit could not produce on such a consistent basis – to the extent that, faced with West Indies’ remorseless champions-elect in the semi-finals, captain MS Dhoni tossed Kohli the ball in the hope that his altogether scantier bowling talents might win the day. The gambit only just failed.
Kohli has carried that momentum into this year’s edition of the IPL, that annual celebration of modern cricket at its brilliant, bombastic peak. Four centuries – his first four in the competition – hauled the powerful but perennially underachieving Royal Challengers Bangalore to the final.