Virat Kohli may have ended his Test career as one of India’s most influential players in the longest format of the game, but he was left with some mental scars after a particularly wretched tour of England in 2014. With scores of 1, 8, 25, 0, 39, 28, 0, 7, 6 and 20 in five Tests, Kohli ended the series with a total of 134 runs from 10 innings at an average of 13.50.
What was even more concerning for the batter was that there was another demanding tour of Australia coming up where he would be tested again. So Kohli called up Indian cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar, hoping his inputs would help him with course correction.
“My hip position was an issue during that England tour,” Kohli had once told Mayank Agarwal in a chat for bcci.tv. “If the right hip opens or closes too much you, you are in trouble. [You have to] keep that hip position nice and side-on and balanced so that you can play through both off side and leg side with equal control is very very important. I came back from England and spoke to Sachin paaji and had a few sessions with him in Mumbai. I told him that I am working on my hip position. He made me realise the importance of a big stride, a forward press against fast bowlers. The moment I started doing that with my hip alignment, things started falling in place nicely and then the Australia tour happened.”
That chat with Tendulkar worked too. Kohli returned from the tour of Australia with 692 runs against his name, scored at 86.50 with four centuries in four Tests.
“Playing at this level over a long period of time, you tend to go into a space where you become a bit insecure, fearful, you want to prove to people how good you are in different conditions,” Kohli had once told Sky Sports in an interview. “To be honest before that Australia tour, I was treating every foreign tour like, more like an engineering exam, that I have to pass somehow and I have to show people that I can play at this level.”
In another conversation with The Cricket Monthly in 2016, Kohli had said he had seeked out Tendulkar to help him deal with “difficult times.” Despite his lack of runs, Kohli called that tour a “milestone” in his career.
“I was too worried thinking about the ball that might come in,” Kohli said. “I was opening up a bit too early so the ball that was going away I was getting out to it every time. I just couldn’t get past that confusion. Even my stride to the ball was not as confident as it should have been. I relied on my hands a lot which in this day and age bowlers find pretty quickly and start targeting the areas you are uncomfortable in. The 2014 [tour] will be a milestone in my career. A lot of people take good tours as a milestone but for me that tour of 2014 is always going to be the milestone in my career from where I thought the thing might go bad for me very soon.
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“In Test cricket, I realised, when it gets tough, to maintain your composure is the most difficult thing. That was something I really needed to correct in me. If that tour hadn’t happened I would have continued probably the same way I was. I wouldn’t have improved upon things. I think that tour really made me think about how I needed to approach my international career and if I just wanted to be a pushover every time I play Test cricket.”
