Back in 2016, India’s future captain Virat Kohli was so ‘eager’ for ODI captaincy that he was given a prep talk by then head coach Ravi Shastri. According to the book written by India fielding coach R Sridhar ‘Coaching Beyond: My Days With Indian Cricket Team, Kohli was told explicitly by Shastri that he must wait until MS Dhoni was done. A year earlier it was Dhoni who had given up the Test captaincy and handed it to Kohli.
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On page 42 of the chapter ‘Cracking The Communication Code’, Sridhar recollected an incident from Kohli’s early days when he was already leading the Test squad but was captain-in-waiting as far as white ball squad was concerned.
“There was a time in 2016 when Virat was very eager to be the captain of the white-ball team too. He said a few things that showed he was looking for the captaincy,” Sridhar narrated.
“One evening, Ravi called him and said, ‘Look, Virat, MS gave it (the captaincy) to you in red-ball cricket. You have to respect him. He will give it to you in limited-overs cricket, too, when the time is right. Unless you respect him now, tomorrow when you are the captain, you won’t get the respect from your team’,” Sridhar said.
According to Sridhar, Shastri in no uncertain terms told Kohli to wait till Dhoni hands it over to him in limited overs cricket.
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“Respect him (Dhoni) now, irrespective of what is going on. It will come to you, you don’t have to run behind it.'” Shastri told Kohli. “To his credit, Virat took the advice on board. Eventually, in a year’s time, he got the white-ball captaincy too.”
Terming Shastri as a “fabulous communicator who talks straight and doesn’t
mince words,” Sridhar also wrote that the former head coach did the proverbial dirty job of informing players when they were dropped.
“He is (was) the one who passes on the tough messages-calls pertaining to being dropped from the XI to the players concerned.”
Virat Kohli and MS Dhoni shared a great camradrie and the latter had revealed to the press how former was the only cricketer to have wished him well after Kohli stepped down from the position of Test captaincy.
“When I left my test captaincy, only Dhoni called me, nobody else did, even though many had my number,” he had said.
(With Agencies)
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