India skipper Virat Kohli says he has learnt to deal with aspirations of a cricket-mad country but making right decisions consistently on a cricket field is a gradual process.
Ready to lead India as captain in an ODI World Cup for the first time, a billion people want their skipper to score a hundred every time he walks out to bat.
Kohli has had the distinction of scoring centuries in India's opening games in the 2011 (vs Bangladesh) and the 2015 (vs Pakistan) editions. Ask him if he could complete coveted hat-trick against South Africa in India's World cup opener on Wednesday, Kohli said dealing with such expectations is now part and parcel of his life.
"Look, when you perform and you perform for a long time, expectations are always there and I sort of understood how to go along with the expectations. You don't go out there to prove anything to anyone, which is a fact, but you have to accept that expectations are going to be there," Kohli said ahead of India's opening game.
Just like Sunil Gavaskar or Sachin Tendulkar, who devised their own mechanism to deal with insane demands, Kohli has also embraced it in his own little way.
"When I walk out to bat, come down the stairs, people will say we need a hundred and all those kind of things will happen. For me, that's just a part of the process now.
"It's not something that I don't want to hear, or something that I think people should not tell me because when you do well, people obviously want to see you do well again and again because they want to see the team win."
"The errors you would make when you are not that aware of game situations. They will slowly start to taper off as you play more and more cricket. So I think what happens also is when you have experienced people in your team who have also grown with you as cricketers, eventually you all start making good decisions."
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