Australia great Ricky Ponting has admitted that he would like former India captain Virat Kohli to be the leading run scorer in the upcoming T20 World Cup later this year. The tournament will be held in Australia and Ponting did add with a smile that he hopes Kohli wouldn't score too many runs against the hosts though.
"I just hope that we see him back at his best and in the World Cup," the two-time World Cup winning skipper Ponting said on the 'ICC Review'. "I'd rather see Virat come out here (in Australia) and be one of the leading players in the tournament, but just make sure he doesn't score many runs against Australia when they play!"
Kohli has been a shadow of his prolific self in the last two and a half years but has looked good in the Asia Cup thus far. He scored 35 off 34 balls in India's opening against arch rivals Pakistan on a difficult and then scored an unbeaten 59 off 44 balls against Hong Kong. India had won both matches.
"First and foremost, great to see him back among the runs," Ponting said after the Pakistan match. "No surprised that he did it in a run chase. We've always known that about him. His record suggests he is better when his team is chasing runs. When I saw his runs and then I've read on social media over the last few days, it sounded like he found himself in quite a dark place. Like a lot of us men, he wasn't willing to talk about it and share it.
{{/usCountry}}"First and foremost, great to see him back among the runs," Ponting said after the Pakistan match. "No surprised that he did it in a run chase. We've always known that about him. His record suggests he is better when his team is chasing runs. When I saw his runs and then I've read on social media over the last few days, it sounded like he found himself in quite a dark place. Like a lot of us men, he wasn't willing to talk about it and share it.
{{/usCountry}}"It sounds like when he has started to share, started to talk, it might have just freed him up a bit and he started to feel better about himself again," the Aussie said, referring to Kohli's recent statement that he was "faking intensity" amid his struggles with the bat.
Asked if the former Australia captain, considered one of the greatest batters of his generation himself, had faced anything similar, Ponting said: "I don't think I can quite relate to the 'intensity'. When things aren't well and you're not scoring the runs you used to scoring, the game all of a sudden seems to be too hard.
"I sort of faced it in the last couple of years of my career where my career tapered off quite quickly... It was almost, the harder I work, the worse I got. For someone like Virat, it was no good having a week off. The fact that he has taken that month off to get away, to sort of regather his thoughts, get himself back where we think he is in the right space mentally... There's lots of good signs there," Ponting concluded.