Tim Paine says it annoyed him when people told him not to sledge Virat Kohli: ‘People don’t get better…’

Former Australian cricketer Tim Paine revealed that it used to “annoy” him when people would say don’t sledge Indian talisman, Virat Kohli. The duo famously got involved in verbal banter during the 2018/19 India tour of Australia when India registered their first series win Down Under.

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. Virat Kohli scored a century in Perth in that series.

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