India vs Australia: Virat Kohli believes he was ‘immature’ to feed off on-field fights

Virat Kohli admitted that he was once “immature” to feed on altercations and on-field fights to get “pumped up” to keep his “focus”.

Virat Kohli is no stranger to controversies. The Indian cricket team skipper is well known for his passionate approach towards the sport and the image of Kohli showing a middle finger to the Australian crowd spread like wildfire across the cricketing world when India travelled to the Down Under in 2012.

Virat Kohli during the team's Australia tour pre-departure press conference at the BCCI headquarters in Mumbai. (PTI)

However, while speaking about on-field arguments and spats on Thursday, Virat Kohli admitted that he was once “immature” to feed on altercations and on-field fights to get “pumped up” to keep his “focus”.

“Those were very immature things that I used to feed on in the early days of my career so that I could get pumped up and don’t necessarily feel all that pressure and the focus is precise,” he said.

“Now being captain of the team, you literally have no room for anything else but think of what the team wants all the time. So there’s no need for these things at all.

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“When it comes to getting engaged in an argument, or a fight, as people like to call it excitedly, I have been completely okay with playing without an altercation. At a personal level, I don’t need to find these things anymore. I have enough belief in my abilities that I can play without a reason to pump myself up,” said Kohli.

While the on-field altercations remains a possibility during the tour of Australia, Kohli said that India have never been the ones to provoke the opposition team. “We were always the ones giving it back. We were never the ones starting anything. So as long as it doesn’t start, we don’t have a problem in focussing on our game and just doing what we need to do,” he said.

“We don’t necessarily need to go and look out for something. If they want to play a certain way, we will reciprocate in that way. That’s how the game of cricket works. In our own mind, we have to keep it competitive and don’t let our energies drop. That will be our main focus,” he added.