I’m not going to sit here and try to comfort anyone, says Virat Kohli

After India conceded the series against South Africa 0-2, Captain Virat Kohli came out to give a fiery, lengthy post the match. There was attack and counter-attack between him and journalists and the skipper was evidently pissed off at some of the questions asked. It was not as if he was denying that the team was below-par because he made sure that pulled up his teammates for repeated mistakes in the first two Tests. Yet, it looked like only he was allowed to do that and anyone else, even journalists, weren’t allowed to pin-point the possible reasons for the loss.

Before this, Kohli had won nine Test series in a row, equalling England and Australia’s record. The 135-run defeat at Centurion meant Kohli losing his first series as a full-time captain across formats. Victory against a dominating South African was going to be tough anyway but the captain was livid with the way the side surrendered in the series after being in good positions in both matches. He began by answering about how it feels to lose because of lack of application.

“At the end of the day one team has to lose. As a team you always try to win. You can accept defeat but not the way we played, the way we let the advantage slip out of our hands, which is not acceptable from a team’s point of view,” said an agitated Kohli. “So many soft dismissals hurt us a lot. Because you work so hard, prepare for a match, get into good situations, shift the game towards you, and then the momentum shifts because of these mistakes. We have repeated these mistakes in both matches. That feels very bad as a team,”

Kohli urges team to introspect

Kohli believes his teammates need to question themselves on their shortfalls. The skipper did not mince any words when he indirectly asked his team-mates to figure out if they are giving it their all in every moment of the match.

“We have not come here to play the way we have done. I’m not going to sit here and try to comfort anyone. We need to be hard on ourselves. We need to ask ourselves if we are giving 120 per cent for the team every time we bowl a ball or play a ball or field a ball.

“We should be reflecting on all our decision-making and all the actions that we have made in this game and the previous game and act upon them. Individuals have to sit and reflect on these things themselves. They do it, I am not saying they don’t reflect on it. We are definitely going to lay out these things in the open,” said Kohli, as reported by Scroll.

Need to build partnerships

Indian bowlers have done a reasonable job so far in the series, letting South Africa breach the 300-mark just once from four innings. Moreover, they were successful in taking 20 wickets in both matches, making it a total of 40 wickets in both the matches. While the bowling was commendable, the batting and fielding let India down. Kohli came down heavily on his batsmen for not applying themselves enough.

“Partnerships of 60s and 70s are not good enough to win Test matches. You need guys to put their heads down when the partnerships has gone to 60 and 70 and try to make it into 100 or 150 to give the team the best chance of winning a Test match or being in a solid position.”

“When you are batting, you want to make big 100s and not get out so that the team benefits from that. When we did well in Australia, we got 450 runs every first innings but our partnerships were massive. That is something we haven’t repeated here.”

“South Africa did not have many partnerships, but whatever they had, one big partnership was always there and that was the key to them consolidating those situations and they deserved to win the series,” he added.