SA vs IND 2018: I'm Not Going To Live In A Dream Land Right Now And Accept All The Praise: Virat Kohli

The way Virat Kohli is batting in South Africa, it won’t be wrong to term the series ‘Virat Kohli vs South Africa’. While it will be definitely wrong to undermine the contribution of the other players, Kohli’s incredible batting prowess has made it tough to look beyond him.

Since scoring 153 in the second Test, India’s captain fantastic has not looked back. And on Friday (February 16), he further enhanced his reputation as arguably the best batsman in the world. He played a stunning 129 runs knock to help India finish the series 5-1. The knock brought an end to an unbelievable series both for Kohli and India.

While India created history by winning their first-ever bilateral series in South Africa, Kohli shattered a plethora of records with his scarcely believable exploits. The 29-year old scored a staggering 558 runs in the six-match series. The runs came at a mind-boggling average of 186, the highest aggregate in a bilateral series.

Kohli’s latest ton, which was his 35th, came off just 96 balls. The knock was studded with 19 fours and two sixes. As a result, India chased down a modest 204 with over 17 overs remaining and 8 wickets in hand.

Not surprisingly, the world is running out of superlatives to hail Kohli but the India star is not getting carried away. The memories of the Test series loss is still fresh in his mind and he is now looking forward to silently do what he does best without much attention.

“Look I will be very honest with you, at this stage, I don’t feel like competing with anyone,” he said after the game ended. “It is all about how I prepare before the game and what my work ethics are and how I am feeling on game day and my only motivation is to get into that frame of mind. I am not competing with anyone at all. If anything, I only look to help my team in any way I can. And during the course of that, I have mentioned that if you are thinking about the team, special things happen.

“Look as I said, I’m not going to give in to this. I know for a fact that 90 percent of the people didn’t give us a chance after two Tests. I was sitting in the same room giving a press conference. So we understand where we’ve come from. I’m not going to live in a dream land right now and accept all the praise and sit here and feel good about this, because it doesn’t matter to me. Honestly it doesn’t.

“As I said I don’t want any tags, I don’t want any headlines, I just go out there and do my job, it is up to the people to write what they write, I don’t want to be called anything, it’s my job, I am supposed to do what I am doing and I am not doing anyone a favour as I said, so just want to be in this zone of working as hard as I can and trying to do the best for the team. Everyone is doing a job, they have the freedom to write and say what they want but it’s very important that I don’t change with that because my zone is very simple, it is simply doing hard work and performing for the team,” he added.

Coming to the game, India won the final ODI by eight wickets to claim the series 5-1. Bowling first, the tourists bowled out the hosts for just 204 before chasing it down without much problem.

Here is the news feed:

SA vs IND 2018: Michael Vaughan Hails Virat Kohli As Greatest Ever ODI Player

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