File photo of Sunil Gavaskar
With Virat Kohli struggling to get out of the rut, the Indian batting unit hasn’t looked as powerful as it was expected to be in Australia. Over the years, Virat has done wonders Down Under, scoring runs for fun but the current tour has seen him getting out to similar deliveries time and again. India’s batting great, Sunil Gavaskar, lent an important piece of advice as he tried to decode the struggles both Kohli and skipper Rohit Sharma have endured in Australia.
Speaking of the outside-off problem that continues to bother Kohli, Gavaskar feels the batter continues to try the cover drive as he has scored thousands of runs while attempting that shot. Gavaskar wants Kohli to dig into the archives and watch his own videos where he couldn’t stop scoring tons.
“Look, he’s scored thousands of runs through that extra-cover drive,” Gavaskar told Hindustan Times. “It’s something that is probably the best shot in the world today, the Virat Kohli extra-cover drive. Not so much the cover-drive, but the one that goes between mid-off and extra-cover. That’s a wonderful shot to see. That’s a full-face-of-the-bat shot. And because he gets so many runs from that shot, he’s tempted to go for that because that’s a very productive shot for him. Maybe that is the reason why he is looking to play over there and gets out. If you see, it’s not that he has opened the face of the bat. It’s not that he is looking to play to the covers. If that was happening, then you could say, hey, don’t play towards cover. But it’s a shot that has got him thousands of runs. Only this time, maybe the late movement is getting him out.”
When asked what Kohli could do on the field to prevent himself from getting out in the same manner again, Gavaskar said: “That’s up to him. It is really up to him, what he does.”
“But you don’t score X thousand runs in international cricket and get that many hundreds unless you know how to approach and build a Test innings. I am sure this one week will give him a lot of time to look at his dismissals. More than the dismissals, I would like him and even Rohit (Sharma, the captain) to look at all the innings where they have scored brilliant centuries. That is what is going to make them start believing. I want that positivity to come into their thinking rather than them thinking only about getting out to deliveries that are on the off-stump.”
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