INTERNATIONAL CRICKET

R Sridhar reveals all in his new book about Virat Kohli and MS Dhoni

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Former India fielding coach, R Sridhar has recently written a new book on his days in the Indian cricket camp.

The book is titled Coaching Beyond: My Days with Indian Cricket Team, which has been co-authored by R Kaushik.

In the book, Sridhar reveals an incident where he tells that Virat Kohli looked quite desperate to get white-ball captaincy for India.

However, then head coach, Ravi Shastri asked Virat to wait and respect MS Dhoni’s decision and he will surely get even the white-ball captaincy as well.

Dhoni had earlier handed over the red-ball captaincy to Virat but was still India’s white-ball skipper himself.

For Sridhar, communication was an essential aspect that he observed during his time in the team.

Writes Sridhar in his book,

As far as the coaching group is concerned, one of the non-negotiables is being honest about developing a culture where you can look each player in the eye and tell him the truth, no matter how bitter or unpalatable that might be.

Sridhar reveals many of the anecdotes of his book

In a chapter titled, ‘Cracking the Communication Code’, Sridhar has revealed an incident where Virat Kohli was still waiting to be crowned skipper in white-ball cricket.

There was a time in 2016 when Virat was very eager to be the captain of the white-ball team too. He said few things that showed he was looking for the captaincy.

Adding further, Sridhar says,

One evening, Ravi called him and said, ‘Look, Virat, MS gave it (the captaincy) to you in red-ball cricket. You have to respect him. He will give it to you in limited-overs cricket, too, when the time is right. Unless you respect him now, tomorrow when you are the captain, you won’t get the respect from your team.’

According to Sridhar, it took Virat just a year’s time to get white-ball captaincy as well from MS Dhoni.

On the other hand, Sridhar has also called Ravi Shastri an excellent communicator who doesn’t believe in mincing his words.

Also, Shastri was the one who took the tough calls when dropping a player from the playing XI.

He is (was) the one who passes on the tough messages- calls pertaining to being dropped from the XI to the players concerned.

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