When India toured Australia in 2014, Virat Kohli was in the news a lot. Before the four-match series, the media was keeping an eye on his every move. He was criticized and the Australian players left no stone unturned in sledging him. However, Kohli was not affected by all these things at that time.

The then 25-year-old Kohli showed his ability and scored 692 runs while Team India was struggling. The sledging from the Australian players made him stronger, which resulted in him being the second-highest run-scorer of the series.

Since that series, there has been a decrease in sledging by Australian players towards Kohli or Indian cricketers. Now once again the teams of India and Australia are ready for the Border-Gavaskar series in November, 2024. Before this high profile series, Tim Paine has said that sledging does not matter to Kohli.

He also revealed that when he was a keeper, he tried to distract the cricketers. Apart from this, he used to get angry when former cricketers advised the Australian players not to sledge Kohli.

Tim Paine’s exclusive interview with CricTracker

In an exclusive interview with Crictracker, Paine said, “People used to say, don’t sledge Virat. If you don’t sledge Virat, most of the time he still keeps scoring runs. So it doesn’t matter whether you are saying something to him or not. I will not try to provoke Virat, but if possible I will try to distract him. If you can distract him even a little bit, he can play a bad shot or lose his concentration. But when people used to say, don’t sledge him, I used to get very angry.”

Let us tell you that before the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in 2018, Michael Clarke had advised Australia not to sledge Kohli and even at that time Tim Paine had said that his team did not want to provoke the Indian captain. However, after the series, former Indian cricketer Virender Sehwag had said that the Australian players were soft towards India. He said that the host team was soft towards the guests considering the IPL contracts of some players.