Hours after India’s Test series loss against South Africa on Friday, Virat Kohli had ended the post-match team meeting at the Newlands dressing room with an announcement and a request. To the surprise of those in the dressing room, Kohli said that he had decided to step down as India’s Test captain. He also asked his teammates and the support staff to keep the news to themselves. Those at the meeting said the captain said “I ask a small favour, please don’t share with anybody outside the dressing room”.
“Everything has to come to a halt at some stage and for me as Test captain of India, it’s now.”
This marked the end of Kohli’s journey as a skipper, as he had earlier relinquished T20I captaincy followed by the selectors’ decision to remove him from ODI leadership.
— Virat Kohli (@imVkohli) January 15, 2022
“It’s been 7 years of hard work, toil and relentless perseverance every day to take the team in the right direction. I’ve done the job with absolute honesty and left nothing out there. Everything has to come to a halt at some stage and for me as Test Captain of India, it’s now,” Kohli wrote in his Twitter post.
At the post-match press conference, after India’s series defeat in Cape Town on Friday, Kohli looked unusually downbeat. The wind of change was blowing in Indian cricket, with Rohit Sharma’s appointment as white-ball captain and his promotion to Test vice-captaincy. Before going to South Africa, Kohli had taken on the BCCI, openly contradicting Board president Sourav Ganguly on the captaincy issue. Later, chief selector Chetan Sharma appeared before the press and corroborated Ganguly’s version. Following Ravi Shastri’s departure as the Indian team head coach, Kohli also had lost his biggest backer in the dressing-room.
