Lahore: Ever since the BCCI announced that opener Rohit Sharma will replace Virat Kohli as India’s new ODI captain, reactions and well wishes from the cricketing fraternity have been pouring in. Now former Pakistan captain Salman Butt has also joined this debate.
On the removal of the veteran player Virat Kohli, from the captaincy of the ODI team Butt explained that he is not surprised by this decision. The workload on Virat was high. People expect him to score more runs.
“This doesn’t come as a surprise to me. It was on the cards. It doesn’t make sense anyway if he’s only the T20I captain. It makes sense to segregate between white between a red ball and white ball to reduce the pressure on a certain player,” Butt said on his YouTube channel.
“India doesn’t not play a lot T20Is; they mainly play ODIs and Tests. To reduce workload (off Kohli), the entire white-ball captaincy had to go one way,” Butt
added.
Butt further reckons that he feels Virat Kohli was overburdened with captaincy pressure and with pressure getting off his performance might get better. Virat Kohli will now work with the team only as Test captain. This will give him time to focus on his batting. The workload on Kohli will also be greatly reduced.
“As I said, there is no element of surprise here. It’s a good thing because you will see Virat Kohli’s performance getting better because he was extremely overloaded. And as it is, the volume of cricket that India plays is very high.”
Butt further added that Rohit was the perfect replacement for Virat. “The pressure is even higher when all eyes are on him and people only talk about him not scoring runs. For people, his scoring 50s did not amount to anything. I reckon this was a perfect exchange with Rohit Sharma.” he explained.
