'I was not...': Virat Kohli opens up on Test century drought in chat with AB de Villiers

Star India batter Virat Kohli recently ended this Test century drought which had lasted more than three years. Kohli scored a hundred, his 28th in Tests, after 41 innings in the fourth Test of recently-concluded Border-Gavaskar trophy which India won 2-1.

Kohli's lack of runs was talked about a lot and with the hundredhe gave his critics a befitting reply. Talking to his RCB teammate and friend AB de Villiers, Kohli explained what that hundred meant to him.

“So, when I made the hundred and converted it into a big one, that gave me a sense of calmness, relaxation, and excitement again,” Kohli told ABD while speaking on the former South African’s YouTube channel.

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“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. 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.

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Kohli also touched upon how much importance he gives to Test cricket and how it requires patience to score runs even on batting-friendly pitches.

“I and AB have been in touch for a while and 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.

“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.

Kohli, despite not getting hundreds in Test cricket since his century against Bangladesh in November 2019, was hitting runs and getting decent scores to his name. The dashing batter, however, said that he wasn't completely satisfied with the outcomes.

“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,” he added.

Notably, Virat is currently second on the list most international hundreds with 75 to his name, and trails only Sachin Tendulkar who has 100 international hundreds to his name.

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