MOHALI: Australian commentators were on Monday full of praise for Virat Kohli’s thrilling batting.
“Steve Smith called it the ‘Virat show’ and he was right,” wrote Chris Barratt in The Sydney Morning Herald, acknowledging the dejected skipper’s post-match remarks.
“With one of the greatest ever Twenty20 international innings India’s batting maestro all but single-handedly sent Australia home from the 20-overs world championship.”
“One man wins it,” agreed The Daily Telegraph’s Ben Horne as he described the match which crushed Australia’s hopes of a World T20 title and puts India through to the semi-finals.
“I think it’s safe to say there is no talent in world cricket at the moment quite like Virat Kohli,” Horne said in a podcast.
Writing in The Australian newspaper, Gideon Haigh said Kohli’s unbeaten 82 off 51 balls had “made an awkward chase look like simplicity itself”.
“Not a stroke, by the way, would have looked out of place in a Test match,” he wrote.
“Much as the marketers would like to take the cricket out of T20, Kohli keeps putting it back.”
While Geoff Lemon, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation said it was hard to feel disappointed at being knocked out by such an impressive innings.
“It is hard to feel anything but awe,” he wrote.
Cricketing greats also heaped praise on Kohli.
“Wow, that was absolute class from Virat. Congrats India on your win,” tweeted spin master Shane Warne.
Former Australia captain Michael Clarke added: “Looked like a class performance from @imVkohli#T20WorldCup”.
“Of the modern players, I’ve always thought thawt Brian Lara was the best placer of the ball,” former Australia captain Ian Chappell told www.espncricinfo.com.
Dismissing criticism of Australia’s preparations and the make-up of the squad, Steve Smith said it had been in the execution of their skills that the players had fallen short.
“You have to try and find your best 15, particularly in these conditions, and I think we had the right 15, we just let ourselves down in key moments,” he told reporters in his post-match news conference.
“Obviously we haven’t done as well as we’d have liked in this format but hopefully we’ll continue to improve.”
The “conditions”, slow pitches which favour spin bowling, were a recurring theme throughout Smith’s postmortem of the campaign but it was the batting in the middle overs that he pinpointed.
“We probably let ourselves down in the middle overs again ... losing a few wickets in clumps, not being able to get that partnerships together to get the score above par to 170-odd, so that was a bit disappointing,” Smith added.
“But I think the players will learn a lot from this tournament, playing in these conditions again, it’s very valuable and hopefully we can continue to learn and get better.”
Published in Dawn, March 29th, 2016
