2 min readApr 6, 2026 01:25 PM IST
India’s batting talisman and former captain Virat Kohli has had an illustrious career in all three forms of the game and can arguably be touted as the greatest Indian batter of the 2010s era, where in red-ball and white-ball cricket, he produced some epochal innings that helped India win matches both at home and overseas.
Recalling how Kohli was when he was young, former England captain Kevin Pietersen, who played with him at RCB in 2009, said that he was “very inquisitive” and realised that he was set for bigger things in his career.
“Very inquisitive. You knew a star was there. Just the way that he asked questions. How much he wanted to learn. How interested he was in getting better. That was the standout. Hugely curious. Very dynamic in the way he went about his approach to the game,” he said on Ranveer Allahbadia’s ‘The Ranveer Show’ podcast.
Kohli endured a dream batting run between 2014 and 2018, where he made centuries in England, Australia and South Africa, but the COVID-19 pandemic brought his stellar purple patch to a halt, and during those pandemic years, the right-hander could not get back to those highs and deliver consistent performances, especially in the longest format.
Pietersen revealed that he could not understand how everyone could write a player as good as Kohli off so soon.
“I knew Virat from RCB, back in 2009. We have just been buddies since. I have always backed him. I remember how bad a time he had during COVID, and how everybody is like, ‘he’s finished. he’s done’. I was like, ‘you can’t just write someone who is so good off as quick as you guys have tried to write him off”
“People are humans. People are not robots. These guys are not robots, and they will fail,” he added.
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Kohli eventually retired from Test cricket in May 2025 after playing 123 Tests and scoring 9230 runs at an average of 46.85. His last Test hundred for India came against Australia at Perth in the first Test of the 2024/25 Border-Gavaskar Trophy in November 2024.
