Royal Challengers Bangalore’s senior statesman Virat Kohli was dismissed for a duck versus Lucknow Super Giants. This was following his scores of 12, 5, 48, 1, and 12 in the previous games after he had started off brightly with a 41*.
What was expected to be a bumper season from Virat Kohli, having given up his India and RCB captaincy, the right-hander has so far managed 119 runs in 7 matches at a mediocre average of 19.83, the fifth-best in the RCB line-up.
Former India head coach Ravi Shastri, who had worked for four years with Kohli, feels that the batsman is “overcooked” from playing so much cricket and burdening such a huge amount of expectation and definitely needs a break from high-level cricket.
Shastri asserted that empathy needs to be shown towards players, especially those who play all three formats plus the IPL and the Indian team management and the board should be careful about not burning out their players due to fatigue.
“When I was coach at the time when this first started, the first thing I said is ‘you have to show empathy to the guys’. If you’re going to be forceful, there is a very thin line there, from a guy losing the plot as opposed to him hanging in there and giving his best. So you have to be extremely careful,” Ravi Shastri told Star Sports.
Shastri reckoned Kohli’s “fried brain” needs a vacation from the sport- be it before the tour of England in July or after that. But with a T20 World Cup and WTC of utmost importance, the former coach feels, Kohli should be given a break so that he could live his career to full potential and can come good for the next half-a-dozen years for India.
“He needs a break because he has got 6-7 years of cricket left in him and you don’t want to lose that with a fried brain. He is not the only one. There might be 1 or 2 in world cricket going through the same. You need to address the problem upfront,” Shastri concluded.
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