India and Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) star batter Virat Kohli opened up on Men in Blue’s ICC Cricket World Cup 2019 semifinal heartbreak against New Zealand, revealing the “dazed” and “hangover” like state of mind he experienced following his team’s failure to win the marquee event under his captaincy. Virat was speaking on the latest episode of the RCB Podcast, released on the franchise’s Youtube Channel. The 2019 edition of the tournament in the UK was Virat’s third World Cup and first as a captain, but India crashed out of the tournament in the semis after losing to NZ by 18 runs at Manchester after a dominant run in the league stage, which saw them win seven out of their nine matches, lose one and drop one game due to rain.
After it rained on day one of the final, where NZ ended at 211/5, the Kiwis were restricted to 239/8. India in reply, lost their first three wickets for just five runs and six wickets for 92 runs before a 116-run partnership between Ravindra Jadeja and MS Dhoni infused life in the match. However, with Dhoni run out during the final moments of the match, India fell short of the target and was bundled out for 221 in 49.3 overs.
Speaking on the RCB Podcast, while reminiscing over team’s T20 World Cup win last year and ICC event heartbreaks before that, Virat recalled, “2019 also was a massive. That was the first time, actually, after the semi-finals got over and the next morning we were going to leave Manchester. You know, when you wake up and you have no kind of understanding of what you want to do. Like, you are dazed. It was like the feeling you get when you have a horrible hangover. It was like that.”
“I had no idea what I wanted to do, whether I wanted to drink coffee, brush my teeth. Like, what is the next step? Like, I was completely gone. I could not make sense of it,” he added.
“Everything was fine. We had to play in the afternoon, and it rained, and then we had to come the next morning. Early morning conditions, this, that, and the others. I was like, what are the odds? But then again, how things unfolded. Again, so you have to kind of go back into that space of looking at things. You cannot get lost in what happened to me, and this is what I am going through,” he continued.
Virat said that maybe, things were meant to be the way they happened, with England prevailing over NZ in the finals on the basis of boundary count after a tied Super Over to clinch their first-ever World Cup title and reach the peak of their white-ball cricket revolution under skipper Eoin Morgan.
“You cannot make sense of these things, you know. You just have to accept things the way.
Of course, accepting is very hard, to process it is very hard, but you have to get to that point and you have to keep moving,” he concluded.
Virat was the 10th-highest run-getter and India’s second-highest run-getter that tournament, with 443 runs in nine innings at an average of 55.37, with five fifties and the best score of 82. Opener Rohit Sharma topped the run-charts with 648 runs at an average of 81.00, with five tons and a fifty.
Other star performers were KL Rahul (361 runs in nine innings with an average of 45.12, a century and two fifties), Dhoni (273 runs in eight innings at an average of 45.50 with two fifties), Jasprit Bumrah (18 wickets in nine matches at an average of 20.61), Yuzi Chahal (12 wickets in eight matches at an average of 36.83) and Hardik Pandya (226 runs at an average of 32.29 and 10 wickets in nine matches).
This tournament was the final one Virat captained in ODIs as the group stage exit in the 2021 T20 World Cup was his last act as India’s white-ball captain. Soon after in 2022, he gave up Test captaincy too, with Rohit Sharma taking over as all-format skipper eventually.
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