King came. He spoke. He inspired. He’d be proud watching the girls play the way they did last night. Watch Virat Kohli’s pre-match chat in the team room on Bold Diaries.
Virat Kohli spoke to the team before they managed to record their first win of the 2023 WPL season.
Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) have had a rather difficult start to life in the Women’s Premier League (WPL) but it looked like things could turn around for them in their last match. Despite being in winning positions a number of times this season, RCB lost all four of their opening matches, which has made qualification to the knockout stage a rather improbable prospect already, but they finally got over the line on Wednesday.
As it turned out, the former captain and talisman of the men’s team, Virat Kohli, had given them a pep talk before the game. RCB need to win all of their remaining games while hoping for a slew of results to go their way to finish in the top three but Kohli said that their aim really should be to give their utmost best regardless of what the result is going to be in the match or in the larger tournament.
Kohli candidly spoke about the fact that he was left with no belief when he had stepped down as RCB captain in 2021. “The time that my captaincy tenure was coming to an end here, I was left with no belief. I was gone, absolutely empty. But that was just my own perspective, that was me as an individual saying I have seen so much of this and I can’t handle it any more,” he said.
“But the next season, new people came in with new ideas, there was another opportunity. They were excited. Maybe as an individual I wasn’t, we reached the playoffs three years in a row and now we start every season with the excitement there was before and I feel excited now. So it is a collective responsibility, if someone is feeling down, the others can pull them up. To be excited to do that under pressure when so many people are watching, what an opportunity. So a lot to take out of these three games starting tonight.”
RCB are yet to win the IPL title and Kohli said that the belief that the fans show in them despite their failures show just how important they are to the franchise.
“I have played IPL for 15 years and I haven’t won it yet but that doesn’t stop me from being excited every year. That’s all I can do, that’s all the effort I can put in every game, every tournament that I play. I we win, great. If we don’t, I am not going to go to my grave thinking oh, if only I had won the IPL I would have been a happy man. It doesn’t happen like that. Always think about the opportunity you have got rather than how hard it is because there is always a flipside that it could be worse than this. I still feel we have the best fans in the world only because we are always committed in every game that we play for RCB and that has been the most special thing for our fans. Now when they see us, the smile on their face tells me that there is belief in our commitment we have towards the team,” he said.