The out-of-favour all-rounder Vijay Shankar was given plenty of chances—to showcase his mettle for the national team but failed to make his presence count. One such incident came during the Nidahas Trophy final against Bangladesh in the year 2018.
The all-rounder failed to connect the ball properly as he consumed more deliveries than the total number of runs scored by him.
Shankar managed to score just 17 runs off 19 balls when India needed someone to step up and deliver the goods.
In dire circumstances, the wicket-keeper batsman Dinesh Karthik saved the day with a blazing knock of 29 runs off just eight deliveries.
Nonetheless, Vijay Shankar was severely criticized for his poor performance.
Social media can affect you: Vijay Shankar
It is cognisance of the fact that social media has given fans enough freedom to give an opinion about cricketers. When a cricketer performs bad, the fans criticise cricketers for the poor performance. Shankar added that even though, he is not much into social media, these things can affect a person mentally.
“With social media, whatever you do, people have the freedom to comment on it. They have their own views and they can come up with anything. I’m someone who’s not much into social media. And even when you’re not into social media, it somehow gets to you. These things can definitely affect you. And it has definitely affected me when I made my T20 debut in Sri Lanka,” Vijay Shankar told Sportstar.
Found it very hard to go out of my house: Vijay Shankar
Upon recalling the terrible experience, the all-rounder Shankar said that he found it hard to cope with the external pressure he was facing. He said he couldn’t even go out of the house as people would come out to ask him about his performance in the match.
“It was pretty hard for me to come out of it. For the first week, I found it really hard to go out of my house. Because, people would come up to me, and they would always ask me about the negative things that had happened. After the first two-three days, I was literally shattered. Every time I went back to sleep, I was in tears.
So, all I could do to come out of it was train really hard. I didn’t give myself any free time, for that’s when you generally get a lot of negative thoughts. Immediately after that tour, we had the IPL and I had a very good season. Everything changed from there. So, according to me, changing the perception is very, very easy. It just changes overnight,” he added.
Besides, he would also breakdown every time he went to sleep. The all-rounder had to train hard during the tough phase.
Things literally changed for Shankar when he upped his ante in the twelfth edition of the Indian Premier League season.