Former Indian batting coach Sanjay Bangar said that Indian captain Virat Kohli would be very disappointed with his shot selection in the Centurion Test. Notable that Kohli got out in a similar fashion in both innings in the first Test match. In the first innings, he chased a wide delivery off the bowling of Lungi Ngidi and he repeated the same mistake in 2nd innings against the debutant Marco Jansen.
“He would have been disappointed with his shot selection. To play that shot first ball after lunch, I think there was a lapse in concentration. Apart from that, I can’t fathom anything else,” Bangar said.
“Kohli being consistently drawn into those wide lines. The attack clearly shows all the balls were in the 6th, 7th stump line, they were not even in the 5th stump line. And that’s where whether Virat Kohli can wear the bowlers down or find a way to get the bowlers bowl at him. He needs to find a way to deal with that,” he said.
Bangar’s observations are quite noteworthy because Kohli recently worked on his batting with Sanjay Bangar in Mumbai when the Indian skipper opted to rest in the first test against New Zealand in a two-match series at home.
Like 2020, Virat Kohli finished this year as well without a hundred. In this year he played 11 tests and scored 536 runs with an average of 28.21 which included only 4 fifties. The last time he scored an international hundred, was in November 2019.
It hasn’t been a great year for Virat Kohli for many reasons as India was knocked out from T20 World Cup held in UAE and he resigned from India’s T20 captaincy, also decided to step away from RCB’s captaincy in IPL. But things got a bit tense when he was sacked from ODI captaincy right before the South Africa tour. The contractor statements by him and the BCCI president made things worse.
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