Former Australia Test captain Ricky Ponting says he is “really surprised” to see Virat Kohli deciding to quit the Test captaincy post, citing his conversation with the India great during the IPL 2021.
Ponting, the head coach of Delhi Capitals, revealed he had a chat with Kohli in the first half of Indian Premier League last year where he indicated he wanted to give away the limited-overs captaincy but seemed very “passionate” to continue at the helm in Test whites.
“Yes it did actually (come as a surprise). The main reason why is that I had a good chat with Virat in the first half of the last IPL. He was talking then about stepping away from the white-ball stuff and about how passionate he was to continue on to be Test match captain,”
Ponting said on the show ‘ICC Review’ in conversation with Isa Guha.
“You can see he just loved and cherished that post so much. Obviously, the Indian Test team had achieved a lot under his leadership. When I heard it, I was really, really surprised,”
he added.
Kohli sent a shock wave across the cricketing world on January 15 when he announced that he is stepping away as India’s Test captain. The decision came a day after India’s bitterly painful 2-1 Test series loss in South Africa.
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Kohli, who had led the team through an otherwise mighty successful tenure, was expected to oversee the imminent transition phase that India’s Test team are about to approach. But he decided to relinquish his position and leave the ball on selectors’ court to appoint his replacement.
In very high praise, Ponting said what Virat managed to achieve with the Indian team in Tests is more “staggering” than even his own tenure with the immensely strong Australian side back in the day.
Ponting backed his statement with a reason that the team Kohli took over was young and inexperienced, positioned No.7 on the ICC Test rankings table, while the team he took over from Steve Waugh was already well-established and had a great line-up across both departments.
“It’s probably more of a staggering achievement for India than it was for us. When I took over, I captained a side that had been dominant in world cricket for a long time.
If you think about India before Virat, it was about winning a lot of games at home and not winning quite as many overseas. The thing that improved the most was India winning a few more games overseas, and that’s something that he and all of Indian cricket have to be really proud of.”
he said.
Prior to leaving the Test captaincy post, Kohli had seen a controversial set of three months in Indian cricket where speculations were on the rise that he is in a rift with the existing BCCI regime, especially its president Sourav Ganguly.
Kohli’s decision to give away T20I captaincy at the end of the T20 World Cup was followed by BCCI and selectors’ own call to remove him from the ODI reigns as well. This created a massive furore, with people taking sides.
What didn’t help the matter were the contrasting statements that Ganguly and Kohli gave with regards to his move in the T20Is. At a time when Ganguly said he asked Kohli to reconsider the call – a sentiment echoed by chief selector Chetan Sharma as well – Kohli himself denied that claim and said the board and the selectors were very supportive of his decision.
Kohli also said that the decision to remove him from the ODI captaincy was communicated to him only “one and a half hours” after the Test team for the tour of South Africa was picked.
