What is ailing Virat Kohli? Why is he not at his fluent best of late? Well, Kohli’s bat will again start talking once the media keeps quiet. At least Rohit Sharma thinks so.

A day after batting coach Vikram Rathour said that he doesn’t think Kohli has been going through a lean patch, Rohit, India’s white-ball captain, blamed journalists for making too much noise about the former skipper, which he thinks is the biggest block on the 33-year-old’s return route to form.

“If you guys (media) can keep quiet for a while, everything will be alright. If talking from your side stops, everything will be taken care of,” Rohit said, in reply to a query on Kohli’s recent slump in form, at a media conference ahead of India’s opening T20I against the West Indies.

“He (Kohli) is in a very good space and he has been a part of international cricket for more than a decade. He has spent so much time in international cricket that he knows how to handle pressure situations. So I think everything starts from you (media) guys… If you guys can keep quiet for a bit, everything will fall into place.”

Kohli aggregated just 26 runs in the preceding three ODIs against the Caribbean side in Ahmedabad. Prior to that, in the ODIs series in South Africa, he did score a couple of half-centuries, but he couldn’t really dictate terms and departed playing loose strokes on both those occasions. In the Test leg of the South Africa tour, the 79 in the first innings of the third Test in Cape Town was his lone quality innings.

Given the lofty standards that Kohli has set for himself over the years, such statistics do look like a slip in form. Or is it?