Kohli: I try to rely on timing to win games for India

Indian skipper Virat Kohli, who played a magical knock in the first T20I against West Indies on Friday at Hyderabad said that he is not a player who looks to entertain the crowd with big hits but rather relies on timing to win games for his country in T20Is. Kohli scored a career-best knock of 94 in 50 balls as India beat Windies by six wickets in a run chase of 2018.

“Whenever I play T20 cricket I am not someone who comes to the ground to hit the ball in the air to entertain the crowd. I focus on doing the job. Our strength as a team is to strike in the latter half of the innings,” Kohli said after the match.

“I don’t want to change my game too much because I play all three formats. I just want to contribute in all three formats, that’s what I want to do. I don’t want to be a format specialist.”

He added that chasing any total of more than 200 tends to create pressure on the batters, but after playing out a few dots in an over, the players naturally start to go for the big hits.

“All the young batsmen watching don’t follow the first half of my innings. That was really bad and I was trying to hit too hard,” he said with a smile.

“It was just about keeping up to the game because I didn’t want to put KL [Rahul] under pressure, so I tried to strike at 140 at least, but I couldn’t get going properly. I analyzed what went wrong and played accordingly in the second half of my innings. I was trying to hold my shape and realized I am not a slogger, so tried to rely on my timing.”

Virat Kohli struggled in the first half of his innings, where he was unable to connect bat to ball and was instead of hitting the ball harder than usual. However, a few run-ins with the West Indies players pumped him up and he broke free in the second half, scoring almost 70 runs in the next 25 balls.