The Indian batting great recalled his successful captaincy stint for India which lasted until early last year.
Virat Kohli recalled his successful captaincy stint for India across all three formats at the international stage, which came to an abrupt end early last year amidst the noise around Indian batting great’s controversial feud with the then BCCI president Sourav Ganguly.
Kohli, who had put a timer on his T20I captaincy tenure with India’s 2021 men’s T20 World Cup campaign and was contentiously sacked as ODI captain, formally gave up Test captaincy, too, following the team’s disappointing 2-1 series loss on the final frontier in South Africa in January 2022.
Before that, the 34-year-old led the team to 65 wins in 95 ODIs and 30 wins in 50 T20Is in a tenure which, however, was lauded for transforming India’s Test match fortunes and inspiring a fit and fast-bowling dominant culture within the side.
Under Virat Kohli, India clinched Test series victories in Australia, West Indies, and Sri Lanka and won games in England and South Africa, while retaining unmatched dominance in Indian conditions with a bowling unit that consistently bagged 20 wickets and kept the side competitive all the time.
Speaking about his elongated tenure in an interview on Puma’s ‘Let there be sport’, streaming on Disney+Hostar, Virat Kohli admitted to have made mistakes during his captaincy tenure but his intentions were never bad.
Kohli said he can bet his life on the fact he gave it his all for the team from the first day of taking up the captaincy job till the last he was there at the helm.
“I have no shame in accepting that I have made many mistakes when I was captain. But the one thing I know for sure is that I never did anything for my own selfish motives,” Kohli said during the interview.
“That I can take guarantee from day 1 to the last day. I had one goal and that was to take the team forward. Failures will keep happening but intent was never in the wrong place,” he added.
The only dent on Kohli’s parade at the top job remained the elusive ICC title, for which he got criticised a lot, especially for the series of middle-order changes that left India unsettled in the lead-up to the 2019 World Cup in UK.
