Former Australian Test captain Tim Paine has said that it used to annoy him when people used to ask him to avoid sledging Virat Kohli. During the 2018-19 edition of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Australia, Paine was engaged in verbal battles with then-Indian captain Kohli on various occasions.
He tried to poke Kohli and other Indian players while wicketkeeping and, in return, had to hear terms like part-time captain. Recalling the famous series in which India managed to get the better of Australia in Australia for the first time, Paine revealed how he was annoyed by suggestions not to sledge Kohli.
“People used to say don’t sledge Virat. If you don’t sledge Virat… most of the time still get runs, so it doesn’t really matter whether you’re talking to him or not. I wouldn’t try too much to fire up Virat, but I would try and distract him if I could because if you can get a bit of a distraction, he might play a bad shot or lose his concentration,” Paine was quoted as saying by CricTracker.
“But it used to annoy me when people say, Oh, don’t sledge him, because people don’t get better because someone’s talking to them,” Paine added.
In the Amazon documentary ‘The Test’, the 39-year-old wicketkeeper-batter, who became Australia’s Test captain after Steve Smith was banned for a year due to the Sandpapergate scandal, described the sledging incident by saying, “I was just sitting and watching him, and he gave a few of our guys send-offs. The plan was not to talk to him when he was batting.”
“When we were batting, it’s kind of up to the individual what they want to do. And I sort of just had enough and thought you also have to stand up for yourselves and your teammates. And that was one of the reasons,” Paine recalled.
“He was trying to upset me with the part-time captain, and I sort of went the opposite with him. I was sort of telling him how good he was and that he was the greatest player ever.”
“You don’t want to get right into a fight with him because that’s what he likes. I was just trying to poke him a little bit and see if I could get him to implode a little bit,” he added.
Kohli played in all four Tests of the 2018-19 Border-Gavaskar Trophy and amassed a total of 282 runs in seven innings. He scored a century (123) in the first innings of the second Test played in Perth, which India lost by 146 runs.
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