Hyderabad: Do you know how it’s like being inside a pressure cooker? No? Ask a cricketer. Jam-packed itineraries; perform or perish-truck coming right for you and other factors at play can definitely shake up the sanity in any normal human being.
But then, that’s the catch. The moment you become a cricketer donning national colours, you’re no longer a ‘normal’ human being. Fame comes with its own fat price tag, and in this case, it’s the requirement for you to keep your emotions under wraps.
Virat Kohli is often touted to be the next big thing in Indian cricket. I agree. The kind of talent the young lad has, it’ll take him places. But there, there’s a small glitch.
The man has anger issues and this is the one factor that could bring him straight down to where it all began. Zilch.
Virat Kohli is known to call a spade a spade. Now, that’s not a bad thing, but Kohli just goes a step ahead and generously adds prefixes and suffixes in the tunes of the BCs and MCs to stress on his point. A one off instance is just fine.
But the staggering frequency at which Kohli is displaying these unchivalrous and inexplicable bouts of anger is honestly quite scary.
Remember the infamous out-of-the-blue marathon abusing jig that Kohli had broken into? One poor scribe bore the brunt of mistaken identities and all hell broke loose when there was abusing galore.
While the team management categorically denied any such incident, it was learnt that the journalist had knocked on the doors of the ICC and had Kohli warned for his behavior.
But then, why are we surprised? Is this the first time the world has seen Kohli’s anger? No. We know his vocab way too well and also know that he does, infact, have a middle finger that he loves to flash oh-so-often.
Day two of the Sydney Test in India’s 2011-12 tour to Australia saw Kohli give us all a meaty glimpse of that now-famous finger, earning him a lot of brickbats. He’s been involved in a lot of altercations with the opposition and team-mates alike and all that goes on to show that perhaps, his temperament isn’t in his control.
This, is his achilles heel, the anger. He needs to work around it somehow, so that his ‘Slang’ headlines don’t outnumber his cricketing feats.