"It used to annoy me" - Tim Paine lashes out at cricket world for 'fear' of sledging Virat Kohli

Virat Kohli is probably one of the very few players that the Australian players don't like to sledge. In fact, most of the bowlers do not like sledging the India superstar who usually gets fired up and delivers his best performance whenever he is verbally attacked.

Time and again, players from the other teams including Australia have admitted that sledging Virat Kohli usually backfires. And one team that has realized this very well is definitely Australia. In 2012 when Virat Kohli was targeted by the Australian players as well as their fans, he had responded by scoring a brilliant century in Adelaide.

Later in the 2014-15 season when India toured Australia again, Virat Kohli was the main man again and he let his bat do the talking. While the Australian media and the players tried to get under the skin of the batting star, he responded in style by smashing 692 runs with the help of a record four centuries and a half-century.

Tim Paine on sledging Virat Kohli:

While Tim Paine was not a part of the Australian squad for the 2011-12 and 2014-15 series against India, he was the captain when India visited Australia in the 2018-19 and 2020-21 seasons. In 2018-19, Virat Kohli led India to their first-ever Test series win in Australia before India repeated the feat again in the 2020-21 season.

During the 2018-19 series, Paine and Kohli were involved in a verbal batter a number of times, and the former Australia skipper has opened up about what it is like to take on Kohli verbally. The former Australia wicketkeeper admitted that even if the opposition players did not sledge Kohli, he would end up scoring the runs. Paine stated that while he did not try to fire Kohli up, he did try to distract him.

"People used to say, don't sledge Virat. If you don't sledge Virat... most of the time still get runs, so it doesn't really matter whether you're talking to him or not," Paine told CricTracker.

"I wouldn't try too much to fire up Virat, but I would try and distract him if I could because if you can get a bit of a distraction, he might play a bad shot or lose his concentration. But it used to annoy me when people say, oh, don't sledge him, because people don't get better because someone's talking to them," Paine told CricTracker.

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Kohli is set to tour Australia with the Indian team again towards the end of the year. India are scheduled to play a bumper five-match series against the reigning world Test champions.