Indian skipper Virat Kohli addressed the media along with head coach Ravi Shastri on Monday in Mumbai before leaving for the one-month long tour of West Indies which begins on Saturday, 3 August.
While speaking to a room full of journalists, Kohli touched upon a host of issues ranging from rumours regarding his tiff with vice-captain Rohit Sharma, upcoming World Test Championship and Ravi Shastri’s future.
While Kohli was critical of the rumours regarding a rift in the Indian dressing room, he was quite optimistic about the Test extravaganza and the opportunity given to the ‘younger lot’ is the limited-over series against West Indies.
Here’s a look at the six talking points from Virat Kohli’s press conference prior to the team’s departure
Indian captain Virat Kohli on Monday categorically refuted rumours of a rift with his deputy Rohit Sharma, saying "people feeding off lies" are being disrespectful to the players' personal lives.
After India's ouster from the World Cup, stories of fissures in the Indian camp emerged with claims that Rohit and Kohli are not seeing eye to eye.
Adding fuel to all the speculations was a cryptic instagram post by Kohli's actress wife Anushka Sharma, which was later deleted.
Kohli, who urged people to come and see the atmosphere in the change-room.
Virat denied that the events in the past few days would make it awkward between him and Rohit in the dressing room in the coming days.
"If I don't like a person or if I am insecure about a person, you will see it on my face or my behaviour towards the person and that's how simple it is," Kohli said.
"We have to reflect as cricketers everyone can take a step back and think are we creating something that's really not out there. You can't play with that kind of passion if you don't get along with each other. As I said, its baffling and its time that we focus on taking Indian cricket forward," Virat added.
Virat said that he is in favour of Ravi Shastri continuing as the head coach of the Indian cricket team despite the criticism it faced following the semi-final ouster from the World Cup.
"But as I had said, it's on the CAC to decide (how to go about it)," Kohli reiterated.
They may have failed to win the T20 World Cup in 2016 and the ODI World Cup in 2015 and 2019, but the Shastri-Kohli duo helped India climb the top of the Test rankings with a historic series triumph in Australia.
The Committee of Administrators (CoA) running Indian cricket has tasked the Kapil Dev-led ad-hoc committee to pick the next national coach. The ad-hoc body comprise former India captain Kapil, Anshuman Gaekwad and former women's captain Shantha Rangaswamy.
Despite a new start after the World Cup disappointment, Kohli admitted that the team is yet to sort out the middle-order conundrum and joked that they might need a "crystal maze".
On a serious note, he felt that the Indian middle-order had been a target of "unfair criticism" being judged on the basis of one or two performances.
"It's very subjective and situation-based. Sometimes you say you have the best top order in the world, which you can agree with; it leads to middle order getting just one or two opportunities, then we judge it based on it. I don't know how to strike balance in it," the skipper said, sounding a bit helpless.
Virat said the ICC World Test Championship, that gets underway on August 1, will add context to the longest format and give it a much-needed boost.
"I think it is a great thing for Test cricket to be honest. We all were looking forward to it because we all felt that after one big series or tour, a one-off Test or a couple of Tests were not apt but I think the Test Championship gives a lot of context to all the Test cricket that we want to play," Kohli said at the West Indies tour's pre-departure press conference.
"So now every session, every game will be more intense. It will be challenging but it will be all the more exciting. All the teams will enjoy through this entire journey," he added.
The opening day of the Ashes series between England and Australia at Edgbaston on Thursday marks the beginning of the World Test Championship. India will play two Tests during the tour of West Indies and those will be part of the championship.
Virat said it will be a "very exciting opportunity" for the likes of Chahar brothers and Navdeep Saini to make a mark in the limited overs format during the upcoming tour of the West Indies.
Deepak and Rahul Chahar, Saini, Shreyas Iyer, Manish Pandey and Washington Sundar are a mixture of new and old faces to have been included in the squad for the limited-overs format.
"Some players who have done really well in the format and shown great composure under pressure in tournaments like IPL, domestically as well. So it's a great marker for all those guys and us as a team as well to have them in the squad," the captain added.
(With inputs from PTI)
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