On Wednesday, April 26th, star batter Virat Kohli was seen stepping out as Royal Challengers Bangalore‘s stand-in skipper during their game against Kolkata Knight Riders at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru.
At the high-scoring place, Kohli won the toss and urged KKR to bat first.
During the toss, the 34-year-old received another loud reception from the RCB home crowd and had to wait for a while before informing Ravi Shastri of his decision.
When asked what he did first after winning the toss, the stand-in RCB captain answered, “Wait a minute,” and laughed with Shastri.
After Faf du Plessis hurt his rib while fielding against Chennai Super Kings in their sixth IPL 2023 match, Kohli has been captaining RCB for three games in a row.
Since then, du Plessis has only batted for his team and has been replaced by the ‘Impact Player’ during RCB’s fielding. Because impact substitutes are not permitted to captain the squad, Kohli has been captaining the team in Du Plessis’ absence.
So far, he has led the team to two victories, against the Punjab Kings and the Rajasthan Royals. At the toss, Kohli shared an update on Du Plessis’ fitness, saying that the usual captain should be ready for their next game against the Lucknow Super Giants on May 1.
Further discussing his experience as RCB captain for the first time since stepping down as full-time skipper in 2021, Kohli stated that it was surprising for him to get to lead the side again, but it has been fun so far.
“It was unexpected but nothing I’m not used to (stand-in captaincy). It’s been fun so far because of the way the team has been playing. Faf will play the impact role again tonight. We are playing the same team as the last game. Hopefully, he will lead from the next game onwards but yeah tonight he will play the same role that he played in the last 2 games,”
said Kohli at the toss.
Returning to the game, KKR got off to a strong start with Jason Roy (56 off 29 balls) and N Jagadeesan (27 off 29 balls) adding 83 runs for the first wicket in 56 balls. Following their dismissals, captain Nitish Rana (48 off 21), Rinku Singh (18* off 10) and David Wiese (12* off 3) guided their team to a first-innings total of 200/5. RCB’s Wanindu Hasaranga (2/24) and Vijaykumar Vyshak (2/41) both took two wickets in four overs.
While RCB failed to chase down the grand total by 21 runs.
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