Former Indian all-rounder Atul Wassan has said that he is not one bit surprised about the fact that Virat Kohli gave up the test captaincy of India after losing the test series against South Africa. According to Wassan, what’s surprising was the fact that MS Dhoni gave up the test captaincy in the middle of a series in Australia in 2014 because nobody could see that coming. Virat Kohli’s resignation was something that was on the cards.
According to Atul Wassan, having lost the white ball captaincy only days ahead of the South Africa tour, Kohli was under pressure to deliver in South Africa which he couldn’t do. He was also “pointing fingers at other players” which was alright because he was the captain and sometimes, the captain has to do those sorts of things to get the best out of the players, but the problem was that he himself was not able to score runs and lead from the front.
Wassan insisted that for a major period of time while leading the Indian team, Kohli was leading by example scoring heaps of runs, but that wasn’t the case anymore in the last couple of years. Since cricket resumed after the pandemic, Kohli couldn’t score a single hundred in any format of the game for 2 years and it was his own form as well which eventually piled the pressure on him.
Captaincy conundrum was started by Kohli himself: Atul Wassan
Talking to ANI recently, Wassan said the whole conundrum related to captaincy was started by Kohli himself when he resigned as the T20 captain of India abruptly right before the T20 World Cup. The BCCI didn’t like it and they decided to then go ahead with one white ball captain rather than having two different captains for T20s and ODIs.
Once the white ball captaincy went out of his hand, Kohli was constantly going to be under pressure with the red ball captaincy and the result of the test series in South Africa, given the fact that it was not a very experienced South African team, only made the situation further difficult for Kohli. Although the 33-year old only captained the first and the third test in the series and the second test was actually captained by KL Rahul, it was still a series loss under Kohli.
Kohli resigned from test captaincy as India’s most successful test captain of all time, with as many as 40 test wins under his belt.
