Former West Indies opening batter Chris Gayle backed India stalwart Virat Kohli to wind up his position on top of the ICC Champions Trophy run-scorers’ graph. The left-hander also sent a lovely message for Kohli’s longest-serving partner Rohit Sharma, urging him to hit sixes and stay on the Wankhede wicket for as long as he wanted.
A little over seven years after fans around the globe last witnessed its action, the Champions Trophy returns to their lives on 19 February. The tournament is reaching new levels of hype and so is the talk around Kohli’s lost form.
In all formats, Kohli is also under this immense pressure to find his long lost touch with the bat.
However, Gayle, who was a former teammate at Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) has now backed the former India captain to emerge as the highest run-scorer in the Champions Trophy.
“Virat Kohli is 200 runs away, so I’m sure he’ll get it. Another record will have disappeared eventually. That’s the nature of the game, that’s the nature of sports also, Gayle said during the Legends League Cricket event.
The Champions Trophy has seen some of the finest ODI performances by the 36-year-old Maharaja. In his 13 matches he has scored 529 runs at an astonishing average of 88.16 and now stands 263 runs away from surpassing Gayle’s 791, the most in the competition.
We still want as many people as possible to be breaking records and setting records, and everyone is within a shot of that. This way all of the issues get an opportunity for continuing to develop the sport and ensure that everybody is a little bit more fun too. He concluded by saying there should be no pressure: “Hopefully, it should be a good Champions Trophy, and to all the teams, all the very best.”
Gayle obviously wouldn’t mind seeing records being broken, and whilst he expects Kohli to break his other records, the other skip of India — Rohit — had bigger ODI record than Gayle over the weekend. Rohit surpassed Gayle on the overall list of career sixes when he hit the fourth six off Ireland’ s Barry McCarthy in the second ODI between India and England in Cuttack.
Rohit, who effortlessly hit seven sixes on his way to a blistering 119, set a new mark for the second-most sixes in the ODIs, surpassing Gayle’s 331. The record was recently broken by ‘Hitman’ so ‘The Universal Boss’ was pleased about that.
If someone is going to break a record, you’d want a player as good as the hitman to break it, you know, said Nasir. “The Hitman has (five) three double hundreds in ODI cricket. And like I said, it’s good for the sport as well, he said.
“Make the game entertaining, and make India entertaining too. We need more sixes, Rohit, hit more sixes, hit more sixes, and enjoy the game, play for as long as the long as you want, just enjoy,” he continued.