Kohli: “A lot of people feel my T20 cricket is going down, I don’t feel it at all”

Virat Kohli feels he is playing “his best T20 cricket again”, scoring back-to-back hundreds at the end of the league phase of IPL 2023 and helping Royal Challengers Bangalore to 197 for five. must-win game against Gujarat Titans. Kohli’s unbeaten 101 off 61 balls guided RCB, especially in the last six overs of the innings, after they were 133 for 5; he put on 64 runs off the last 34 balls with Anuj Rawat to give his team a huge total.

When asked by Ravi Shastri after the innings how he felt at the crease, Kohli said: “Yeah, I felt good. A lot of people feel that my T20 cricket is going down, but I don’t feel like that at all. I feel like I’m playing my best T20 cricket again. I’m just enjoying myself about myself, this is how I play T20 cricket, I expect to hit gaps, hit a lot of boundaries and finally big ones if the situation permits.

“Strike counts, all those things, like I said before … You’ve got to read the situation and rise to the occasion when the situation calls for it, and I take a lot of pride in doing that, and I’ve been doing that for a while. I feel really good about my game right now and how I hit there in the middle.”

Kohli surpassed his former RCB teammate Chris Gayle for most centuries in the IPL and became the third batsman to score consecutive hundreds in the IPL after Shikhar Dhawan (2020) and Jos Buttler (2022). Later in the evening, Shubman Gill also joined that club.

Kohli and Faf du Plessis gave RCB a quick start in the opener with 67 in 7.1 overs before RCB lost three wickets – including du Plessis and Glenn Maxwell – to the Titans’ spinners in the space of 13 balls.

“The spin was not easy to get off and I think the strength of a lot of our fast bowlers is picking up as well,” Kohli said of their scoring and the conditions. “This pitch has enough for our bowlers to make a dent [chase], and hitting big shots, as you saw in the middle storms, wasn’t so easy when the field spread out. So you have to hit a lot of gaps and run in pairs. If we can close those margins and let them run two of those gaps now, it’s going to be a very tough chase.”

But Gill’s unbeaten 104 off 52 ensured that was not the case, knocking RCB out of the tournament as the Titans chased down their target in 19.1 overs.

“Obviously very disappointed,” du Plessis said after the game. “You get to the last game of the campaign, you want to make sure you get through. But we played against a very strong team tonight, Shubman Gill played an amazing innings to get a hundred. We were a bit off in one or two areas and when you play a team like that they benefit from that.

“The conditions were really wet in the second set but I think it was also wet in the first set with a lot of moisture from the rain [which delayed the start by 55 minutes]. So we changed the ball three times, there wasn’t much traction in the second set. But I thought 195 was a good score, Virat played an incredible knock to give us a chance but we needed Shubman’s wicket to feel we were really in the game.”

One of the biggest positives for RCB this season was the opening partnership between Kohli and du Plessis. The pair added 939 runs in 14 innings, matching Kohli and AB de Villiers’ record for the most runs by a pair in a T20 tournament in IPL 2016.

“He [Kohli] has played really good cricket all season,” du Plessis said, “and as a partnership I don’t think there was a single game where we didn’t score 40 for the opening stand. [they failed to add 40 in four out of 14 innings]. So it was really pleasant for both of us that we got the team off to a really good start. But it just goes to show that Virat has a lot left in T20 cricket; he’s still playing really well.”