"I'm done...": KL Rahul breaks silence on facing brutal social media abuse

India star KL Rahul has opened up on the trolling he faced on social media while also revealing how he dealt with it. The right-handed batsman has been a regular in the Indian team for almost a decade now but has struggled with consistency in international cricket.

Time and again, KL Rahul has faced severe criticism from fans and experts in the past. Even though he has done well consistently in the IPL, he has faced the heat for his strike rate in the shortest format of the game. It is one of the main reasons why he was not included in the India squad for this year's T20 World Cup even though he did extremely well in the ODI World Cup last year.

KL Rahul's inconsistent display with the bat had also made former India bowler Venkatesh Prasad question his place in the team publicly. Prasad had taken to X (formerly Twitter) last year to slam the Indian team management for picking the struggling batsman in the playing eleven.

While players are not new to facing criticism, more often than not, the criticism is often replaced by trolling. And Rahul found himself at the receiving end a couple of years ago.

In a recent podcast, the star batsman said that while he was good at handling the trolling, he found it tough to deal with the situation a couple of years back.

Rahul recalled that he was being trolled for almost everything he did. Rahul said that while he still uses social media, he tries to spend as little time on it as possible.

"I used to be good with [handling] trolling. I did not care, but I feel I was much younger back then. And then, a couple of years back, I was exposed to a lot of trolling. If I sat, I got trolled, if I stood, I got trolled," Rahul said on Nikhil Kamath's podcast.

"I am done with the trolling now. For the last one and a half years, I have gotten off Instagram completely. I still go, post and do my things and get out of that place as quickly as possible," he added.

KL Rahul falls down the pecking order:

While KL Rahul is still one of India's most important batters, he has definitely fallen down the pecking order, especially in Tests and T20Is. He was recently replaced by Shubman Gill as the vice-captain of the ODI team as well.

He has not played a T20I since the 2022 T20 World Cup and is unlikely to earn a recall soon as the likes of Rishabh Pant, Sanju Samson, and even Dhruv Jurel are ahead of him.

In Tests, his last appearance came in the first Test of the five-match series against England earlier this year. Rahul, however, continues to be an important member of the ODI team and was a part of the squad for the Sri Lanka tour earlier this month.