Virat Kohli has not been able to live up to expectations in the ongoing Border-Gavaskar Trophy. The batting maestro is under immense pressure despite scoring a century in the second innings at Perth, his numbers in the series turning out to be a big worry for the visitors. The former skipper has scored 126 runs in five innings while 100 of which came up in a single innings at Perth. The Aussie pacers have managed to exploit his weakness outside off-stump and he is constantly getting out in the same fashion.
Former Australian captain Greg Chappell analysed Kohli’s struggle in recent times and called it Elite Performance Decline Syndrome or EPDS, which he suggested even the likes of Sachin Tendulkar and Ricky Ponting went through.
“The first visible sign of EPDS is a subtle but unmistakable shift in a player’s approach at the crease. Kohli, once renowned for his domineering starts, has in recent years shown a tendency to begin tentatively. Much like Tendulkar and Ponting before him, Kohli seems to need a buffer – a score of 20 or 30 – before he can rediscover his flow,” Chappell wrote in his column for The Sydney Morning Herald.
Chappell advised Kohli to set a target of getting to 20 or 30 first to take the psychological advantage and regain some confidence in the middle.
“Reaching a score of 20 or 30 acts as a psychological turning point, helping them regain the confidence and fluency of their prime,” he wrote.
‘Confidence is an emotion…’: Chappell’s advice to Kohli
Kohli’s first innings average in the 2024-25 season starting from the Bangladesh series is 73 runs in 8 completed innings with an average of 9.125. The sequence of scores are 6, 47, 0, 1, 4, 5, 7 and 3.
Former India coach Chappell asserted that confidence is the key to returning to form.
“The only cure that I know is to rekindle the thinking of your youth. That is easier to say than to do, but it does work. Confidence is an emotion – so if you can recreate that, there is no reason why you can’t reinvent yourself,” Chappell suggested.
Comments are closed.