‘Angry Celebrations Are a Thing of the Past’: Virat Kohli Says Last Two And a Half Years Have Taught Him a Lot

India batting superstar Virat Kohli endured a testing phase that saw him not scoring a century for nearly three years across any format. Not that he wasn’t scoring runs but the three-figure scores which he so easily use to peel off, often at an alarming rate, had disappeared.

However, he ended the wait with a maiden T20I century in September 2022 and has since scored centuries in ODIs and Tests too. Now, he’s just a couple of hundreds away from matching the all-time ODI record for most hundreds set by the legendary Sachin Tendulkar.

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Since that T20I century, Kohli has scored six more hundreds to take his overall tally to 77 across formats.

The lean phase, Kohli admits, taught him a lot and he has become a lot calmer, saying the angry, aggressive celebrations that quite often followed his hundreds are now in the past.

“The last two and a half years have taught me a lot. Those angry celebrations are a thing of the past. I have had many suggestions, lots of advice has come my way; people were telling me I was doing this wrong, that wrong,” Kohli told ICC.

Kohli adds that while there wasn’t much wrong with his technique as it was the same that fetched him truckloads of runs in the past, the issue was mental.

“I picked out all the videos from the best time I had, same initial movement, same approach towards the ball and it was just what was happening inside my head, I wasn’t able to explain it to anyone,” he said.

Kohli will next be in action at the ICC Cricket World Cup, the fourth such event of his storied career.  His first world cup was in 2011 when India won their second ever ODI world title.

Kohli and Ravichandran Ashwin are the only two members from India’s class of 2011 that created history by becoming the first ever team to win the showpiece on home soil.