Royal Challengers Bengaluru: Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s (RCB) star batter Virat Kohli emphasised his counter-batting style against the spinners in IPL 2024 and said that the sweep has been a “key scoring option for him.”
Kohli top-scored with 92 off 47 as RCB posted a massive 241/7 in 20 overs against Punjab Kings at the HPCA Stadium on Thursday night. Kohli slammed seven fours and six sixes at a strike-rate of 195.74 in his vintage knock, which also took him past the 600-run mark in IPL 2024.
Kohli relied on the sweep shot to pick off runs against wrist spinner Rahul Chahar and all-sorts spinner Liam Livingstone, scoring 26 of the 92 runs against them.
“I’ve brought out the slog-sweep to the spinners. I just mentally put myself in that situation and I didn’t practice it at all,” Kohli said after the match. “I know I can hit it because I’ve hit it a lot in the past. So, I just felt like I need to take a bit more risk and for me that shot was something that I used to hit regularly back in the day. And that’s allowing me to hit off the back foot as well because I’m always looking to expose that side of the field against the spin.
“For me that has been a massive factor in this IPL.”
“So, I think it just takes a bit more conviction and take out that thought that props up: ‘what if you get out’. I’ve been managing to stay ahead of that thought in this IPL and that’s really helped me in the middle overs in this IPL, keeping my strike rate up and keeping the scoring rate going for the team as well,” he said.
Kohli could have been out on the third ball of the innings if Ashutosh Sharma had not dropped a difficult catch at point off Kaverappa. In the same over of Kaverappa, Kohli got another life on 10 when Rilee Rossouw dropped another catch at extra cover.
The right-hander’s impressive knock helped RCB to achieve their fourth consecutive win of the season by 60 runs after losing six games in a row.
“The only way to go through a long tournament is to be absolutely honest with yourself. We were just not good enough in the first half of the tournament. (It’s) precisely why we are in a situation again where so many factors have to go our way. We won the second game of the season and then we had those losses on the trot. A couple of close games but still we were outplayed in most of them,” said Kohli.
The pivotal moment for RCB this season, according to Kohli, was their one-run loss to the Kolkata Knight Riders at Eden Gardens, where Lockie Ferguson was run out on the final ball. RCB came dangerously close to chasing down 223 against one of the tournament’s top teams.
“We just had an honest chat in the change room. That’s not good enough. Playing at this level, we need to pull up our socks and be a bit more brave with the ball and bat. The starting point was Kolkata, where we came out and bowled like that in the powerplay and kept hunting for wickets in that game. It went down to the wire and that gave us a belief that this is the cricket we want to play and it came to a point where we said ‘you know what don’t look at the (points) table and play for the self-respect we have as cricketers’.
“We have gone through so many hardships and such a long journey to be at this level. So, we can’t just go out and play in a way that doesn’t make yourself proud and the fans well. They turn out in huge numbers and we just can’t keep disappointing them like that,” he concluded.