Former India captain Virat Kohli ended his drought of Test centuries that went on for over three years with a masterful 186 off 364 balls in the fourth Test against Australia. It was Kohli's first Test century since November 2019 and his celebration was a rather muted one. Kohli won the player of the match award for the performance and stated that he was happy for having been able to perform the team required him to more than anything else.
"The expectations that I have for myself as a player are more important to me. I think in Test cricket I wasn't able to play with my tempo and template that I have played with for the last 10 years for awhile now. So that was the one thing I was trying to do. I felt like I was batting really well from the first innings in Nagpur. But we focussed more on batting as long as possible for the team. I did that for periods but not to the capability that I have done in the past. From that perspective I was disappointed but there was belief there that I was playing well and if I got an opportunity on a decent wicket then I can make a big one," Kohli said in the presentation ceremony.
Interestingly, Kohli's wife and Bollywood star Anushka Sharma had said that the former India captain had played through sickness to score the century. Kohli said that while he and Axar Patel, with whom he had shared a 162-run partnership, had thought of playing positively after Day 3, the injury to Shreyas Iyer forced them to take the safer option of playing time.
“When I was 60 not out overnight, we did think about playing positively the next day but unfortunately we lost Shreyas to injury so we were a batter short. The plan then became to bat time and make sure the opposition doesn't sneak into the game. They are very good at doing that, finding opportunities and trying to get a result. I was happy with the tempo because of those reasons. The way the innings went, I felt that they had some very good fields and were very consistent with the balls. They didn't give me any boundary balls at all and I didn't want to create any because as I said, we were a batter short and that would have meant that we were just trying to struggle to make ends meet. In the end, we got the result from a batting point of view. Got a bit of a lead and gave ourselves a little bit of a chance. Everything went according to plan,” he said.
India captain Rohit Sharma later said that he didn't know if Kohli was sick. “I don't think he is sick, he was coughing a little but I don't think he was that bad healthwise,” he said. India won the four-Test series 2-1 after the drawn fourth Test and will now meet Australia again in June for the 2023 World Test Championship final.