At a private event on Saturday (March 15), India star Virat Kohli opened up on his process for coping with disappointment at the highest level.
A week out from the start of the 2025 IPL season, Kohli made an appearance as one of the speakers at the RCB Innovation Lab Indian Sports Summit, organised by his franchise Royal Challengers Bengaluru.
He touched upon several topics in a wide-ranging chat alongside former England international Isa Guha – one of them being the way he copes with disappointment as an athlete at the highest level.
Kohli: Sometimes people feel more for you than yourself
Asked about the lowest point of his career, he answered, "I can't pinpoint one...for example, if you ask me the intensity of how disappointed I felt, for me the most recent Australia tour would be the one that's most fresh. So it might feel the most intense to me."
India lost the Border-Gavaskar Trophy for the first time in five editions this January as Kohli himself had a lean run, averaging just under 24 with the bat.
Kohli did stress that his career had taught him that he could not dwell on these low points. "For a long period of time the tour of England in 2014 was the thing that bothered me the most," he said. "But I can't look at it that way. I might not have an Australia tour again in me, in four years' time, I don't know.
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"So I don't have the chance to correct that," he continued. "But you have to make peace with whatever's happened in your life. Like 2014, I still had the chance to go in 2018 and do what I did. It might have not been the case, it might have been another blunder but it didn't turn out to be that way. So there's no such guarantees in life."
'For me, it's just about acceptance'
"I think when you are at a stage for a long period of your life, when you perform and people get used to your performances, they start feeling for you more than you are sometimes," Kohli continued. "Today as well, disappointment that you have might not be as intense as the disappointments around you."
"And you have to be very careful about that, taking on the energy and the disappointment from the outside. When you start burdening yourself way more and then you start talking about, 'I've got two innings or three innings left on this tour and I need to make an impact now' and you start getting more desperate. That's something that I've surely experienced in Australia as well.
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"Because I got a good score in the first Test, I thought, 'Right, let's go, there's going to be another big series for me.' Doesn't turn out that way, so the question you're asking, how do you cope up with this? For me, it's just about the acceptance of, okay, fine, this is what happened."
Kohli will be in action next on March 22 at Eden Gardens for RCB, as they take on Kolkata Knight Riders in the IPL 2025 opener.
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