Virat Kohli is slowly moving towards the end of his career. After winning the 2024 T20 World Cup title, Kohli announced his retirement from T20 International. Kohli’s retirement surprised everyone. This time the T20 World Cup was different for Kohli. In the matches played before the final, Kohli had scored only 75 runs and then in the final he played an important innings of 76 runs. Pakistani batsman Umar Akmal told an interesting story about Kohli’s poor form.
Akmal told that when MS Dhoni was asked to drop Kohli from the team, he also agreed to leave the captaincy. This was in 2012-13 when Pakistan toured India. Akmal told this story on the show ‘Haarna Mana Hai’. Akmal said, “I was having dinner with MS Dhoni in 2013. Shoaib Malik, Yuvraj Singh and Suresh Raina were also present. Kohli was going through a similar phase. Then the Indian team manager came to Dhoni and told him to drop Kohli from the last ODI.”
Akmal further said, “Dhoni replied that I have not gone home for 6 months. Why don’t you book my ticket along with Virat Kohli? Then the manager told Dhoni to play whoever you want.” Akmal was completely shocked to hear this answer from Dhoni. Umar further told that Dhoni said to him, “Virat is our best batter. If he fails in 3-4 matches then why should we drop him?”
Virat had said goodbye to T20 International immediately after winning the title. Soon after Team India won the T20 World Cup 2024 title, Kohli announced his retirement from T20 International. He had said that this was his last T20 World Cup and he also played the last T20 match for India. He further added, “It’s high time that youngsters should get chance to prove themselves”. Along woth Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Ravindra Jadeja also retired from the T20 internationals.