Virat Kohli hosted a few of his old Test teammates, Rishabh Pant and Shubman Gill, at his residence on Monday night. Although he recently announced his Test cricket retirement, India’s top cricketer Virat Kohli appears to still be part of the Indian team.
According to reports, Kohli hosted Team India’s new Test captain Shubman Gill, new vice-captain Rishabh Pant, fast bowler Mohammed Siraj and a few others at his house in London, days in advance of India’s five-match Test series against England. As the first Test at Headingley is currently ongoing from June 20, Gill and co. had an evening at Kohli’s residence relaxing.
Gill, Pant and a few other Indian team members met with Kohli at his London residence for a couple of hours, according to a video report from RevSportz. England tour would be the maiden Test series of Shubman Gill as the captain of Team India in red-ball cricket. Gill replaced Rohit Sharma as India’s permanent Test captain. Rohit and Kohli had declared their Test retirement one after another during IPL 2025.
In the meantime, England’s great fast bowler James Anderson relished his duels with Indian legends Sachin Tendulkar and Virat Kohli throughout his 21-year-long career but he considered bowling against the latter slightly more challenging.
Anderson, who debuted in 2003, hung up his boots only last season to end a remarkable career. The Lancastrian achieved success against Tendulkar as well as Kohli, dropping the Indian legends nine and seven times each.
“I did have some success early on against Kohli the first time he visited England (2014). I just exploited, he had a vulnerability outside off stump, just exploited that and then the second time I played against him (in 2018), he’d gone away and practised up on that and it was like bowling to a different player,” said Anderson to talkSport.
That being said, Tendulkar and Kohli were in different phases of their careers when they encountered the challenge from Anderson, who still plays county cricket at age 42.
“He’d (Kohli) improved his game to a whole new level made it extremely tough for not only me but for the bowlers in general and I think I bowled him out, maybe four or five times in the first series and didn’t bowl him out in the second series I played against him.”.
“Against Sachin for instance I didn’t sense like there was that type of change in dominance. With Kohli, there certainly was a change and yeah I found him a very tough bowler to bowl at because he had this sort of steely mentality as well.”
He described Tendulkar as having a ‘God-like’ personality whereas Kohli was an in-your-face personality. Kohli wanted to get into a fight. He wanted you to know (that). He’s extremely competitive and after that initial success it was quite hard to match him.”.
