'When he was captaining, I noticed one thing...' Rohit Sharma showers praise on Virat Kohli

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Rohit Sharma's India won the first Test against Australia in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy (BGT) 2023, stepping one mile closer to their dream of making it to the World Test Championship (WTC) 2023 final.

The Nagpur Test was Sharma's third-only game as a captain in the format. He made it memorable by smashing his first-ever Test century as a captain. He also showed an extraordinary trait of rotating his bowlers, especially the spin-trios. 

After the first match, the Indian captain - in a fun chat - told what a tough job it is captaining two-three spinners at home. India fielded three spinners - Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja and Axar Patel - at Nagpur. 

In the last fixture, Ashwin and Jadeja did the majority of workload. On his Test return, the maestro left-armer took a five-wicket haul in the first innings, while the legendary off-break bowler scalped a fifer in the second innings. 

"Every one of them is near a milestone. There’s like a milestone every day. Someone is close to taking 5 wickets (talking about Mohammed Siraj in an ODI), someone takes 250 wickets (citing Jadeja), someone takes 450 wickets (mentioning Ashwin). So every day, someone or the other is getting to a milestone," Sharma said in a post match interview.


After the Test match, where India won by an innings and 132 runs, the Indian skipper also spoke about his predecessor Virat Kohli and what he has learnt from his captaincy tenure. 

"When Virat was captaining, I noticed one thing, no matter if we got a wicket or not, the pressure had to be there so that the opposition made a mistake. That's what I learnt when Virat was captaining and these guys were bowling. That's what I try to do now," he said.

Under Kohli, India won 40 Test matches - the most by any Indian captain. The Unique Selling Proposition of his captaincy was aggressive and heat, which Rohit recalled.

The first Test match of the BGT 2023 is scheduled to be played between February 17-21 at Delhi's Arun Jaitley Stadium.