India and Australia are currently the two strongest teams of the cricket world and whenever they face each other, the contest is intense and highly competitive. Players from both the sides don’t hesitate in sledging each other in order to distract and break the concentration of the opposition players and recently the former Australian skipper Tim Paine opened up about the matches against India and his verbal battles with the Indian cricketer Virat Kohli.
Tim Paine was appointed as the skipper of the Australian team after Steve Smith’s suspension as he was found guilty of being involved in Sandpapergate scandal and Australia played the 2018-19 Border-Gavaskar Trophy under his leadership.
Tim Paine used to get indulged in verbal spats with the Indian batters while wicketkeeping and in return, he was called a part-time captain by the Indian cricketers.
During an interaction with a sports portal, Tim Paine recalled those days and said that he used to get annoyed when he was told by people not to sledge Virat. He said that whether you sledge Virat Kohli or not, most of the times he scores runs and he wouldn’t try to fire up Virat but he always tried to make him lose his focus so that he might play a bad shot.
Tim Paine recalled a sledging incident; he was sitting and watching, Virat Kohli had given send-offs to some of the Aussie cricketers. He added that the plan was not to talk to Virat when he was batting and when the Aussies were batting , it was an individual to decide what they want to do.
Tim Paine said that one of the reasons behind sledging Virat Kohli was that he felt that he just had enough and he thought that he needed to stand up for himself and his teammates as well. He further said that while Virat was trying to upset him by calling him a part-time captain, he tried the opposite thing by telling him how good cricketer he is and he was the greatest of all times.
Tim Paine stated that he didn’t want to get into direct fight with Virat Kohli as this is what he likes, he was just trying to poke him a little bit and try to make him make an error.
India retained the Border-Gavaskar Trophy 2018-19 after winning the four test match series by 2-1.
