Mumbai: India skipper Virat Kohli quashed rumours of a rift in the team, saying he is baffled by talks of things not going well between him and vice-captain Rohit Sharma.
“In my opinion it’s baffling to be honest. It’s absolutely ridiculous to read such stuff that comes out. I have been to a few public events and the sentiment is “aap log kya khele (you guys played so well).
“We are feeding off lies. We are overlooking facts. We are turning a blind eye to all the good things that has happened. We are creating fantasies and scenarios in our head and want to accept that this is the truth,” Kohli said while addressing the pre-tour media conference here ahead of the West Indies tour.
“I have seen this for too long now. Bringing personal lives into the picture. It’s disrespectful after a moment. There is nothing between me and Rohit,” kohli said.
It all started when news was leaked in the media that a senior player had got his wife to stay with him for longer than the ‘family clause’ of the BCCI allows and that too without the permission of the captain and coach.
This after former CJI R.M. Lodha and senior BCCI officials questioned the decision of the Committee of Administrators (COA) to let the captain and coach decide on the travel plans of WAGs. In a bizarre move, a Committee of Administrators (CoA) member had told IANS that the committee wouldn’t react to rumours of rift till the players approached them.
“The CoA cannot be reacting to reports in the media. If the players have any issue, they can/should bring it up with us. As far as the committee is concerned, there is no rift till the players talk of it with us,” the member had said.
The trouble apparently started brewing post the loss to England in the World Cup. The bowling unit supposedly felt humiliated post a team meeting after the defeat in the group-stage encounter. “The bowlers were given a showdown after the loss and they felt that it wasn’t just a case of bad bowling and there were more areas that needed to be looked into before pointing fingers at the bowling unit,” a source in the know of developments had told IANS.
Another board functionary said that the reports of rift need to be addressed at the earliest to avoid a scenario wherein the performance of the team can start getting affected. “It is like any other discord at a workplace which can affect the performance of the team. If this is not nipped in the bud immediately, there is a real danger of things affecting the spirit of the team and as a result, their performance.
“You cannot have two leaders of a team or their media teams taking pot-shots at one another. There is no denial of a rift and the big shot administrator says that it is a media creation. If that is the case why are they giving impetus to the media creation rather than dispelling it,” the functionary had said.
