“So sorry, please don’t ban me”: When Virat Kohli pleaded the referee not expel him

Back to ” 2011/12 season, Virat Kohli begged to relocate the match so as not to ban it. Right-hander Heem Bacon gave the middle finger to a jeering crowd during a test match in Sydney at the time.

The India tour of Australia in 2011/12 was the highlight of Virat Kohli’s Test career. A junior Test player back then, Kohli was often on the bench after his debut. But he was backed right from game 1 of the Test series Down Under. He was on the cusp of being dropped after the 2nd Test but got captain MS Dhoni’s backing, who kept him in the playing XI despite below-par returns.

While he got the captain’s green signal to play the 3rd Test, Kohli probably wouldn’t have been able to play the game, courtesy of his on-field behaviour in the Sydney Test match.

During the 2nd Test in Sydney, Kohli was being jeered by Australians while he was fielding at the boundary line. He wasn’t the batting powerhouse that he is today but continued to attract the public’s attention. Angered by the crowd’s reaction, Kohli showed his middle finger to them. The mainstream media coverage saw Kohli making headlines in Australia as well.

In an exclusive interview in the Wisden Cricket Monthly, in 2018, Kohli had revealed that he pleaded with the match referee to not ban him following the incident. At first, Kohli revealed that he acted as if nothing happened.

“The one thing I remember most is when I’d had enough of the Australian crowd at Sydney [in 2012] and I just decided to flick a [middle] finger at them. ‘I’m so cool’,” he told Wisden Cricket Monthly.

“The match referee [Ranjan Madugalle] called me to his room the next day and I’m like, ‘What’s wrong?’. He said, ‘What happened at the boundary yesterday?’. I said, ‘Nothing, it was a bit of banter’. Then he threw the newspaper in front of me and there was this big image of me flicking on the front page and I said, ‘I’m so sorry, please don’t ban me!’. I got away with that one. He was a nice guy, he understood I was young and these things happen.”

Kohli’s Test career blossomed after the Perth Test as he followed up with 116 and 22 in the Adelaide Test match. Kohli was India’s only centurion in the Test series. Incidentally, it was at Sydney where Kohli had first ted Team India as full-time Test captain.

In 2018, he conquered Australia and became the first-ever Asian captain to register a Test series victory Down Under. Ajinkya Rahane joined the skipper on the elusive list in 2020/21.