Virat Kohli giving pep talk to RCB Women. (Twitter/@RCBTweets)
Kohli shared his experiences and offered tips that might help the Smriti Mandhana-led side put their best foot forward
Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) Women’s team endured a torrid time in the inaugural Women’s Premier League (WPL), having lost their opening five matches of the season. However, when the chips are down, they received a massive morale boost when they were paid a visit by none other than the former captain of the RCB men’s team Virat Kohli. The ace batsman gave the women’s team a pep talk that is sure to put the team in a good frame of mind and the result was evident when they recorded their first win of the tournament by beating UP Warriorz on Wednesday.
Kohli shared his experiences and offered tips that might help the Smriti Mandhana-led side put their best foot forward. “I have been playing IPL for 15 years and I haven’t won it yet. But that doesn’t stop me from being excited every year. That’s all I can do. That’s the effort I can put in. Every game, every tournament that I play. If we win, great. If we don’t, I am not going to go to my grave thinking only if I had won the IPL I would have been a happy man dying. It doesn’t happen like that,” he said.
The video was tweeted by RCB from their official handle.
Check out the tweet below
Kohli has been a part of the RCB franchise since the first edition of the IPL back in 2008. He was made the captain of the side in 2011 and took over permanently from Daniel Vettori towards the end of the 2012 season. He stepped down ahead of the 2022 edition.
RCB’s best showing under Kohli came in the 2016 edition, in which they finished runners-up to the Sunrisers Hyderabad, losing the final by a mere eight runs. Kohli was the highest run-getter with 973 runs, including four hundreds and seven fifties.
“Always think about the opportunity you have rather than how bad it is right now. There’s always a flip side to it and it could always be worse than this,” Kohli said.
The RCB Women registered their first win beating UP Warriorz Women by five wickets. Chasing 136 for victory, RCB Women got there with 12 balls remaining. Kanika Ahuja did the star turn with the bat, scoring 46 off 30 balls, while veteran Australian Ellyse Perry was the pick of the bowlers, taking three wickets for 16 runs in four overs.
The RCB Women have two matches in hand: one against Gujarat Giants Women and the other against the table-topper Mumbai Indians Women. They need to win all their matches and hope that the results of the other matches also go in their favour to have any chance of progressing to the title round.
The team finishing top of the table will automatically qualify for the final, while those placed second and third will have to fight it out in the Eliminator for a berth in the final. RCB Women are currently placed fourth.
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