Sunil Gavaskar faced the ire of the Virat Kohli fans after he slammed the senior Royal Challengers Bengaluru player for his comments on commentators.

With Kohli’s strike rate in the ongoing IPL often being a crisp topic for debate, commentators and critics, including Gavaskar, have dived in with their opinions. But Kohli was not amused with that and had lashed out at all such talk after scoring an unbeaten 70 off 44 balls against Gujarat Titans last week.

“For me, it’s about winning the games for the team and there’s a reason why you have done it for 15 years... I am not quite sure that if you have not been in that situation yourself, to sit and talk about the game from the box,” Kohli had said.

Gavaskar, on Saturday, chose to reply to that.

“Commentators questioned only when his strike rate was 118. I’m not too sure. I don’t watch too many matches, so I don’t know what the other commentators have said otherwise. But if you come and open and then have a strike of 118 when you get out in the 14th or the 15th over, I mean, if you want applause for that, that’s a little bit different,” Gavaskar said before the RCB-Gujarat Titans match on Saturday.

“All these guys talk about, ‘oh we don’t care about outside noise’. Accha! Then why are you replying to any outside noise or whatever it is. We all played a bit of cricket, not a lot of cricket. We don’t have agendas. We speak about what we see. We don’t necessarily have any likes and dislikes. Even if we have likes and dislikes, we actually speak on what is happening,” said Gavaskar.

“I hope Star Sports realises that when that clip is shown, questioning the critics, the critics are your own commentators. For you to show the person belittling your own commentators, I’m not sure that’s a great thing. You need to realise you have shown it enough times, everybody’s got the message. I would be very disappointed if you show it once more,” a straightforward Gavaskar said. But the Kohli fans did not like it and criticised Gavaskar on social media.