When a cricketer reaches the stature that Virat Kohli has, even their success sometimes seems like a failure. The batter, who’s played so many great knocks that one couldn’t even count them, did so once again in the RR vs RCB match. The maestro scored the first century of the IPL 2024 season and distanced himself from other batters in the league by a margin of over 130 runs.
Junaid Khan takes potshot at Virat Kohli for ‘slow’ century
However, a former Pakistan fast bowler who had an upper hand over Virat Kohli in international cricket has criticized the knock. Junaid Khan is a name many Team India and Kohli fans will remember. The left-arm pacer had Kohli’s number, getting him out 3 times in just 27 balls he bowled to him, while the batter managed to score just 7 runs off him.
Taking to X (formerly Twitter) the former quick mocked Kohli for recording what was the joint slowest hundred in the history of the IPL.
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Is the slow century criticism fair?
One can have two thoughts: Kohli played slow; that’s why RCB failed to score big; or other batters failed, and that’s why Kohli couldn’t go big. Both of these can be right. Given the lean patch of form the other batters are in, criticizing someone who scored 61% of the total team runs isn’t fair. Other than Faf du Plessis, who scored a sluggish 44, the other three batters combined scored 15 runs from an equal number of balls.
If Faf had been striking quicker, one could have levied some criticism on Kohli’s slow pace. But the opener struck at 133 compared to Kohli’s 157. One can take aim at Kohli’s slow starts in general, but today (April 6), when everyone underperformed barring Kohli, no fair criticism can be levied on him.
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