Only a few years ago, press conferences involving members of the Indian cricket team would often start with the media manager asking reporters to limit themselves to ‘match-related questions.’ The sky could have fallen in the world of cricket but you were to restrict your enquiries to the match scheduled the following day. A bit later, during the heady unchallenged days of his captaincy, Virat Kohli once even glowered at a media manager for letting a reporter ask a question that was seemingly out of syllabus for the day.
Time passes, equations change, and how! On Wednesday, as Kohli’s online press conference – the first he had addressed since losing the ODI captaincy – wound to a close, the India Test captain himself prevented the media manager from formally ending it. “I can see there are some more questions popping up on chat,” he said.
A couple of more questions were then taken at the captain’s behest. He was asked why he was removed as ODI skipper and about the long-rumoured rift between him and new white-ball captain Rohit Sharma. Kohli gave detailed answers to both.