Former Team India player Robin Uthappa believes that stepping down from captaincy has helped the veteran India batter Virat Kohli evolve massively as a batter in the IPL. He left the captaincy of RCB at the end of the 2021 season, with the franchise still searching for a maiden title as well.
After a poor 2022 IPL season, Kohli has been on fire as a batter from the 2023 to 2026 seasons, scoring over 600 runs on each occasion. Moreover, he has increased his batting tempo over the years in the IPL, achieving his best strike rate of 165.84 in this year’s edition as well.
Talking about Virat Kohli’s evolution as an IPL batter, Uthappa said on the CommBoxTV YouTube channel, “This era of expressing yourselves more has unlocked him. But the captaincy not being on him anymore has unlocked him the most. When he was captain, he was so driven to take the team to victory by himself. Because of that, he played a certain way to produce results that he wanted to for himself and for the team. Today that doesn’t exist for him.”
“That took a while and I remember there was a period of wilderness for him, where he was trying to find where he fell in the whole scheme of things within the group. Once captaincy went away from him, for a period it almost felt like he felt lost and without purpose. That affected his form and his demeanor a bit. He then went soul searching and became even more spiritual. Then, he finally found a place where he can exist,” he shared again.
Robin Uthappa also believes that watching Team India struggle to consistently win matches while growing up played a part in Virat Kohli playing within himself to make sure the team’s success. However, he remains the IPL’s all-time leading run-scorer with 9,336 runs as well.
“When he was young, he saw India regularly losing matches. So he probably said to himself that when he played for India, he would win matches for them by himself. That became his primary driving force as a batter. And he overextended on it a little bit. But the release from being a leader to playing a role for the team has been a delight to watch,” he concluded.
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