We always knew Kohli was going to be a great player, says Gary Kirsten
BCCI
Former Indian Cricket coach, Gary Kirsten, has revealed that the management always knew Virat Kohli was going to be a great player. The former South African player also stated that he is enjoying his reunion with the Indian skipper as they start building the World Cup-winning relationship again.
Gary Kirsten, with his trademark coaching style of keeping notes on each and every player, has always been a wanted person in international cricket. And after an unsuccessful IPL stint with Delhi Daredevils back in 2015 he has returned to the cash-rich league again, this time as RCB’s batting coach and mentor. In between this, he has been coaching BBL’s Hobart Hurricanes as well, which doesn’t make the 50-year-old any new to franchise cricket.
In an interview with TOI, the World Cup winning coach decided to open up about the differences between coaching a franchise team and a national team.Â
“It is different because with a franchise team, your stakeholders are regional. You have the owner who shows a particular interest in the success of the team. The focus and the attention is narrow. Whereas with an international team, the stakeholders are the entire country. It is a much bigger journey and a lot more people are involved in the success of the team,” said Gary.
Gary’s biggest ICC moment would perhaps be India lifting the World Cup title in 2011, wherein he had nurtured a young Virat Kohli around numerous veterans. And Gary has revealed that Kohli’s consistency, even back then, had made it amply clear that he was going to make it big. Gary has looked excited about his reunion Kohli this season, and stated that they are rebuilding that old bond.
“It is great to be working with Virat again because he started when I was the coach. We had a lot of conversations early in his career about how he needs to set up his game. We knew he was going to be a great player, it was just a question of when and how he needed to play to be able to achieve the consistency in his game.Â
A lot of those conversations have in many ways given him some of the thinking around how he needs to build his game. That has been fun. To come back and start working with him again to see how he is going, we are just kind of building that relationship again. I am really enjoying it,” said the former South African player.
Gary is known to have an eye for good players and Kohli was one of Gary’s recruits, whom he rated highly that time as well. Analyzing Kohli’s game back in 2008, he said that Kohli had the hunger to be great back then, so he was one of his easy choices.Â
“Any guy with half a cricket eye would have known that he was going to be a great player. His hunger for runs, his ball-striking ability - we are talking 2008 - he hit the ball to all parts of the ground, got natural power and then the determination to go with it. He had the hunger to be great. It was all there. That's one of the easier recruitments you could make,” said the former Indian coach.Â
However, Gary also stated that Kohli has a huge learning curve ahead of him and he has been on the right path. Having grown from a promising player to a match-winning player, Gary has been of the opinion that Kohli’s biggest challenge would be to maintain his consistency over a longer period of time.Â
“It has been an amazing natural progression. As he moves into this next phase - he has gone from the prodigious talent to the high performer, the challenge now is to maintain consistency for a long period of time, to grow his leadership base and he is doing that because I think it is an ongoing process. He seems to be in a space where he is really willing to take the learning that's needs to be taken,” said Gary Kirsten
