Former Australian skipper Tim Paine said it annoyed him when people advised him to not sledge Virat Kohli. Paine admitted Kohli was bound to score runs either way and it didn’t matter if Australia sledged him or not.

On the 2018-19 tour of Australia, Virat Kohli and Tim Paine were involved in a verbal banter. Meanwhile, it has been noticed that Kohli gets fired up when the opposition tries to sledge him.

“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. 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,” Former Australian skipper told CricTracker.

“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 added. In the Amazon documentary, The Test Paine described the sledging incident: “I was just sitting and watching him and he gave few of our guys send-offs. The plan was not to talk to him when he was batting.”

“When we were batting, it’s kind of up to the individual they want to do. And I sort of just had enough and thought you also have to stand up for yourselves and stand up for your teammates. And that was one of the reasons,” Paine recalled. “He was trying to upset me with the part-time captain and I sort of went the opposite with him. I was sort of telling him how good he was and that he was the greatest player ever”

“You don’t want to get right into a fight with him because that’s what he likes. I was just trying to poke him a little bit and see if I could get him to implode a little bit,” he concluded.

Meanwhile, Virat Kohli became the first captain to take India to a Test series win (2-1) on Australian soil.