Virat Kohli was back to where it all started almost two decades ago.
The former India captain will be playing the Ranji Trophy match against Railways from Thursday, marking his return to the premier domestic competition where he last featured in November 2012, against Uttar Pradesh in Ghaziabad.
He arrived at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi around 9.30am on Tuesday and, after a team huddle and some warm-up exercises, proceeded to play football for about 15 minutes with his teammates. The superstar enjoyed the laughter-filled session before proceeding to the nets for an intense workout with the bat which began with throwdowns.
Except pacer Navdeep Saini, all the other members of Delhi’s squad had only seen him on TV and grown up listening to the tales of how Cheeku, as he is commonly called in his close circles, became the king of Indian cricket.
“I remember it was Ajit Chaudhary, the erstwhile manager of the Delhi Ranji team, who nicknamed him Cheeku back in 2006-07,” Delhi and District Cricket Association (DDCA) secretary Ashok Sharma, who knows Kohli from the time he first came to the Kotla for U-15 trials, recollected.
The DDCA had even organised his favourite chhole poori after practice but he settled for kadhi chawal for lunch.
Courteous with everyone around, Kohli seemed more comfortable with his former U-19 coach Mahesh Bhati, who is also the administrative manager of the Delhi squad. The two coaches — head coach Sarandeep Singh and batting coach Bantu Singh — were by his side throughout.
Having spent some time on front-foot strokes, he concentrated on fine-tuning his backfoot play against short-pitched bowling with a much thinner-looking and lighter bat. Then he moved to the adjoining nets where the spinners were bowling and batted against left-arm spinners Harsh Tyagi, Sumit Mathur and offspinner Sumit Sharma. Here he switched to his normal bat and was beaten by Tyagi, prompting Sarandeep to advise Kohli in Punjabi to switch to a middle and off-stump guard.
Kohli also reunited with his former teammate Shawej Khan, who played age-group cricket with him. Kohli stopped practice and was seen chatting with Shawej for some time before signing the ‘Uncle Kohli’ poster his son Kabir was carrying.
Once the nets session ended, Kohli gave Shawej a bear hug, autographed
his son’s bat and imparted some advice.
The day ended with some slip-catching and high catches in the outfield.
Be it the Internationals or domestic cricket, Kohli’s dedication is unwavering and the juniors who saw him from close on Tuesday must have learnt a thing or two.
With inputs from PTI