Sourav Ganguly finally reveals real reason behind Virat Kohli's ouster as India team captain

India hasn’t been able to win an Apex Governing Council Trophy since 2013 and lot has been said during these years about the inability of this India team to choke in knockouts of big tournaments while playing good cricket all along. 

While there is no denying this fact one thing has also been very clear year during these years the Indian team has emerged out to be one of the best travelling teams during these years. With Virat Kohli  being at the helm of the affairs during this period, India has stamped their authority by performing well in alien conditions and one man that deserved most of the credit for this shift in Indian cricket is Virat Kohli.

Under Virat Kohli’s leadership, the fast bowling culture seeped into the India team which was earlier dominated by spin and medium pacers who were more focused on line and length rather than speed. The duo of Virat Kohli and Ravi Shastri were the ones who spoke about throwing the pitch out of the equation and instilled the belief in the team that they could win in every condition.

But Virat Kohli's captaincy stint came to a bitter end with him reportedly being forced to step down from the white ball captaincy in 2021 by Sourav Ganguly who was at the helm of the affairs at BCCI during that time which eventually led to Virat giving up the test captaincy too at the start of 2022.

‘I didn’t remove Virat- Sourav Ganguly

But at last Sourav Ganguly spilled the beans on the whole Virat Kohli captaincy saga and said that he didn’t force Virat to leave captaincy but he wanted to relinquish his T20 captaincy and Ganguly then told him that if he did so then he would have to give his one-day captaincy too as the board wants to have a separate captain for red ball and white ball and not for the white ball only which eventually lead to Virat leaving captaincy in all three formats.

Saurav Ganguly in a reality show said, “I didn't remove Virat from captaincy. I have told you this a lot of times. He was not interested in leading in T20Is. So, after he made that decision, I told him, if you're not interested in leading in T20Is, it's better if you step down from entire white-ball cricket. Let there be a white-ball captain and a red-ball captain,".

Ganguly’s role in bringing Rohit Sharma as captain

However, Ganguly admits that he played a major role in getting Rohit Sharma as a captain of India in all three formats. He reveals, “I pushed Rohit Sharma  a bit to take up the captaincy role because he wasn't interested in leading in all three formats of the game. 

So, maybe I have a bit of contribution in that but no matter who is administrating, it's the players performing well on the field. I was appointed as the President of BCCI to work for the betterment of Indian cricket, this is a small part of it".