Ganguly Wants Kohli to Improve Captaincy after Toping Test Ranking List

Indian captain Virat Kohli has recently dethroned former Australian captain Steven Smith and became the No.1 test batsman after his 22nd Test century and 220-run tally in the Edgbaston Test against England.

Cricket news: The players should be given more time and should not be rotated often, says Sourav Ganguly

Kohli has now become a member of an elite group which consists of Sunil Gavaskar, Dilip Vengsakar, Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir, as all had once reached the top spot.

Kohli has got 934 rating points and Donald Bradman, with 961 points in 1948, leads the chart currently. Kohli is also the No. 1 batsman in the ODI ranking list.

In the Edgbaston Test, Kohli’s heroics had almost won the Test for India, as he scored 149 in the first innings and then 51 in the second.

However the team lost by 31 runs because of the underperformance of the top-order batsmen in the likes of Murali Vijay, Shikhar Dhawan, KL Rahul and Ajinkya Rahane, who scored just 99 runs in between them.

While former India captain Sourav Ganguly is happy with the individual performance of Kohli, he is not satisfied with his captaincy as he feels he need to instil more confidence in his players.

“If you’re the captain, you will be criticised for a loss the same way as you will be congratulated for a win,” Ganguly wrote on Instagram. “One criticism for Kohli is that he should give a consistent run to his batters and more time before dropping them.

“The captain should give confidence to his players. It’s his team and only he can change their mindset. He will have to sit with them and tell them that if he can do it, so can they.

“He should give them time and tell them to go out and play without any fear. It is true that after continuous chopping and changing of the playing XI, players can get afraid that after all these years, they’ve failed to garner the faith of the team management.”

So far Kohli has single-handedly carried the batting lineup as he scored 486 runs at an average of 60.75 so far. While the other four top-order batsmen along with Cheteshwar Pujara and Rohit Sharma have scored 809 runs among them with an average of 21.86.

The team lineup has also been very fluid as team combinations are frequently changed and Ganguly believes there should be consistency in selection, as that had been central aspect for many successful teams.

“The good thing about the great teams of the past – be it Australia or South Africa or our very own team which won the series here [in England] in 2007 – was that the boys used to play both formats [Tests and ODIs] of the game. So even if you played badly in one or two matches, you got a lot of time to get back into form at the international level. Playing and scoring 150 in first-class cricket can’t compensate for international cricket. In this team no batsman except Virat plays all formats,” said Ganguly.