'Scoring ton in Ahmedabad gave me a sense of calmness'

New Delhi:  Star India batter Virat Kohli has said that he felt a sense of calmness and excitement after scoring a hundred against Australia in Ahmedabad which ended his three-year century drought in Test cricket.  After a wait of 1205 days, Kohli registered his first Test century since 2019 and overall 28th, in the fourth Test of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy earlier this month.  There was a gap of 41 innings between his last century and a ton in Ahmedabad, with the previous one coming over three years ago against Bangladesh in November 2019, where Kohli scored a sublime 136 at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata.

"When I made the hundred and converted it into a big one, that gave me a sense of calmness, relaxation, and excitement again. You kind of become comfortable with your game, and your thinking, and your heart is not rising before the next practice session. You eventually want to be in such a space. And that particular hundred gave me a grounded feeling back," Kohli said in a chat with his good friend and his RCB teammate AB de Villiers on the latter's YouTube show. Just from a cricketing perspective. In life, I was pretty happy and relaxed. But when playing also, you want to be in that space as much as possible," he added.

"I and AB have been in touch for a while. He knows how much I value Test cricket. Even though I had performed in T20Is again and scored ODI centuries and all that stuff, I always felt that white-ball cricket, for me, was more of a thing where if you go in with the right frame of mind on a particular day or for a certain period of time, you can get past the hurdles," Kohli further said.

"But even though we played the Test on a wicket that is not offering too much to the bowlers, you still have to bat for good 7-8 hours sometimes, because they (Australia) are that patient with their fields and they could go defensive. It was just testing me constantly. That is something that I have always cherished as a cricketer," he continued.  The former India skipper further said that he was happy with his contributions to the team but was not doing enough to convert his decent score into big runs.

Kohli had gone without a fifty-plus score in his last 15 innings in Tests before he scored 186 against Australia.  "I was getting decent scores, but if you ask me if I was happy with what I was doing. I wasn't. I pride myself in performing for the team to the best of my ability, I certainly wasn't doing that enough. I wanted to score big runs, that's something that always propelled me, whether it was at home or away. I was doing that to a certain extent. But I was not having the same kind of impact that I had before," Kohli said.