'Harder I Worked, The Worse It Got'- Empathising With Virat Kohli, Ricky Ponting Opens Up Old Wounds

Virat Kohli stunned the cricket world when he revealed his struggles with mental health. Just like any other Indian cricketer, Kohli must have felt the weight of the whole world on his shoulders as his fans expected him to perform exceedingly well in the upcoming Asia Cup especially after going through a severe run drought in recent times.

Also Read: Virat Kohli’s Chilling Revelation Ahead of Asia Cup Opener: ‘Was Trying to Fake My Intensity’

It all started to unravel for Kohli when India were knocked out of the 2021 T20 World Cup after losing to arch rivals Pakistan in the very first match. After this, Kohli left his T20 captaincy and later saw his ODI captaincy stripped off by the BCCI. Meanwhile in January 2022, he left his job of Test captaincy as well.

In the lead upto IPL, a lot was expected of him, especially from the one who had relinquished all his responsibility and free from all burdens. Although Kohli scored just one fifty, by the time the season ended, he had accounted for 439 runs in 16 games.

However, things got even worse as he landed in England and scored just 12 runs in the two T20Is he played. A warning sign in a T20 World Cup year. Clearly the circumstances were getting the better of him. In the end, he confessed.

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“For the first time in 10 years, I didn’t touch my bat for a month. I came to realisation that I was trying to fake my intensity a bit recently. I was convincing myself that no, you had the intensity. But your body was telling you to stop. The mind was telling me to take a break and step back,” Kohli said in a video posted by Star Sports.

Just like any other legend of the game, former Australia captain too took note.

“I don’t think I can quite relate to the ‘intensity’ (comment),” said Ponting. “When things aren’t well and you’re not scoring the runs you used to scoring, the game all of a sudden seems to be too hard, he told ICC Review.

“I sort of faced it in the last couple of years of my career where my career tapered off quite quickly … It was almost, the harder I work, the worse I got.”

Also Read: From Average T20 Batter to White-Ball Beast, Virat Kohli Showed How Orthodox Batting Can Win T20 Games

“I was so focused and conscious on being perfect and doing things exactly right, thinking I had to do that to get the best out of myself, but all I was doing was putting pressure on myself and not letting myself play the game the way I always played it.”

“I reckon it might be a bit of that creeping in with Virat as well. It’s just human nature when things aren’t going the way you want, you push harder, you try harder, and the harder you try the harder it gets.”

Kohli returned to cricket after a month long break. This was his second such break from international cricket in four months.

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