Auckland, Nov 9 (PTI) New Zealand great Kane Williamson says words of wisdom from close friend Virat Kohli “showed him the mirror” and helped him decide on his international retirement earlier this year.
Williamson ended a 16-year-old international career agonisingly short of 10,000-run mark in Tests. Kohli too was short of the milestone when he called time from the longest format.
Kohli and Williamson have been friends for a long time, and the Indian superstar was among those the Kiwi consulted before announcing his retirement.
“I spoke to a number of people I trust and I’ve been really really close with. And then I actually had a really really cool chat with Virat like the day before I announced it and it was really like looking in the mirror just sharing the experiences that we’ve had in the game for so long,” Williamson said on ‘Between the Two Beers’ podcast.
Kohli now plays only ODIs, having retired from Tests ahead of the England tour last year. Williamson and Kohli have been contemporaries and that made the latter’s inputs more valuable.
“He’s (Kohli) still playing a little bit, but largely he made some of those big decisions and that like honestly just cheering… There’s no one else I think, even players in your own team from, at times, that have just been in that exact same position for the exact same length of time, captaincy roles, children at the same time.
“Like we sort of live this parallel thing. We had a really quite special relationship, but although different worlds, and it was just quite a cool thing to be able to share some of that real vulnerable stuff and how you were feeling and and just connect over it and it and I was like I walked out of there or I got off the phone, my wife walked into the hotel room and I was like, it’s time,” said Williamson, who made 9515 Test runs while Kohli made 9230.
Williamson said he was never driven by the personal goal of completing 10,000 Test runs.
“You don’t do it for those reasons. But if they’re no longer yours and there was a term that he did use and it was this idea that you can start playing for the gallery. You can start, like holding on or doing things for reasons that aren’t just… I use the word pure maybe like for your own measure of it, but that aren’t just you that drive you back to the craft and to being a part of the team.”
Williamson also racked up 7256 ODI runs and 2775 T20 runs.
“Every interview I did, they would ask about it and they were never the things that drove me, you it wasn’t a number. It wasn’t to get to 10,000 runs to a point where I genuinely believe that if that was a goal of mine at the start, I wouldn’t be close.
“We wouldn’t sit here and even reference it, because what is your definition of success? Is it is it an average? Is it a certain number of hundreds? They’re essentially limitations and often you might have a successful career but probably fall short because your goals are lofty, and I don’t know, it wouldn’t have been true to me,” added Williamson. PTI BS SSC
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