During his purple patch in the year 2016, Virat Kohli Desperate for the ODI captaincy and the then head coach Ravi Shastri asked him to do the honors M S DhoniFormer fielding coach R Sridhar has revealed in his new book that he passed judgment and waited for the responsibility to fall into his hands.
In his book ‘Coaching Beyond: My Days with the Indian Cricket Team’ co-authored by journalist R Kaushik, Sridhar talked about communication, which he felt was the hallmark of the coaching staff during his time with the Indian team.
“As far as the coaching group is concerned, one of the nonnegotiables is being honest about developing a culture where you can look each player in the eye and tell him or her the truth, no matter how bitter it may be.” Or unpleasant,” Sridhar wrote in his book.
On page 42 of the chapter ‘Cracking the communication code’, Sridhar recalled an incident from former Kohli’s early days when he was already leading the Test team but as far as the white-ball team was concerned Yes, he was the captain.
Sridhar said, “There was a time in 2016 when Virat was very keen to become the captain of the limited overs team as well. He said some things which showed that he was looking for the captaincy.”
“One evening, Ravi called him up and said, ‘Look, Virat, MS gave you this (captaincy) in red-ball cricket. You have to respect that. He will give it to you in limited-overs cricket as well. The time is right. Unless you respect him now, tomorrow when you are the captain, you will not get respect from your team’, Sridhar said.
According to Sridhar, Shastri explicitly asked Kohli to wait till Dhoni handed him over in limited-overs cricket.
Shastri told Kohli, “Respect him (Dhoni) now, whatever is happening. It will come to you, you don’t have to run after it.
“To his credit, Virat took advice on board. Eventually, in a year’s time, he got the white-ball captaincy as well.”
Sridhar termed Shastri as a “brilliant communicator who talks straight and doesn’t mince words”, Sridhar also wrote that the former head coach did the proverbial dirty job of informing players when they were dropped.
“He (was) the one who passes through the tough messages-calls related to the exclusion of the concerned players from the XI.