
Former India assistant coach Sanjay Bangar has said that Virat Kohli could have continued to be the Test skipper for a bit longer. Kohli quit the captaincy in January 2022 as not only India's but one of the world's most successful skippers. He led India in 68 Tests and won 40 of them - the most by an Indian skipper and the fourth most overall.
"Captaincy of the Indian team is a 24/7 job. Lot of on and off the field things happen like selection, non-selection and team performance. So, it does take a toll (on individual performances). Him giving up captaincy at that time means he is now playing with lesser responsibilities. Even though I personally feel he could have continued a bit longer as Test captain," Bangar said while speaking on The Rao Podcast.
Bangar also revealed how Kohli tweaked his game a bit during the dip in form to get back to scoring double tons.
"It is humanly impossible to sustain at the level at which he was playing between 2014 and 2019. The dip had to come. When you play with that sort of passion he was scoring daddy hundreds. But he told me that he wasn't scoring a double hundred. After a while he realised that there is a process to which he can make double hundreds and once he tasted that he made four or five in one season," shared Bangar.
Kohli is India's one of the prolific batters of all time having also gone past Sachin Tendulkar's record of most ODI centuries. He now has 50 ODI centuries - one more than Tendulkar. Overall, he's just second to Sachin (100) with 80 international tons.
Among the runs scored, Kohli has most runs (26,942) among the active batters while being fourth overall in history behind Sachin (34,357), Kumar Sangakkara (28,016) and Ricky Ponting (27,483).