Faf du Plessis on Virat Kohli: 'He visibly made the Indian team harder, tougher'

So long has Virat Kohli been one of the defining figures in Indian batting that it's hard to remember a time when, as Dale Steyn puts it, he was an 18-year-old with "slightly chubby cheeks and full of enthusiasm". Steyn was one of Kohli's first team-mates at RCB and has seen him up close, both as a team-mate and an opponent, across their careers.

Faf du Plessis, on the other hand, knew Kohli as the opponent and captain who "really got under our skin" before taking over from him as RCB captain. It laid the foundation for a prolific batting partnership and an even closer friendship between the two former captains, even if du Plessis calls it "the most expensive relationship of my life."

In Cricketers on Cricketers, Steyn and du Plessis draw on their experiences of Kohli as team-mate, opponent and friend. They discuss the different sides of his personality, on and off the field, and what it means to know one of the most followed sportspeople in the world.

Steyn: That's the one thing about Virat that I've always appreciated and I've loved is that he wears his heart on his sleeve. I actually remember watching the Under-19 World Cup. We had a tour of India. Sehwag had just smashed us. He scored 300 in Chennai in a day. We had had a tour somewhere else, maybe just before that. I think we'd even gone to Bangladesh just before that. I remember watching India beat South Africa U-19s in the [2008] World Cup, and India stormed the field. And I saw this kid, and I was like, who's this cocky little bloody s***? You know? And next thing I find out, he's actually in my team.

He's with us at RCB. And I'm like, oh my goodness. I gotta deal with this little guy, you know? Anyway, it turns out when I met him, we had a lot of common interests. We were young and we enjoyed a little bit of an off-the-field kind of enjoyment in life. We used to go to all the restaurants and stuff that Bangalore had to offer - Hard Rock Cafe was a particular favourite one. There was good music and there were burgers and everything like that. So, we hung out quite a lot. Early days of Virat Kohli, he was a normal T-shirt and shorts with the slops [flip-flops] kind of guy. Then the sponsors rolled in. You could tell, from a cricketing point of view, he was talented, but he needed a little bit of direction.

And when Ray [Jennings, then head coach] came in year two, he started to whip a lot of the guys in line. I think some of the older guys also knew that the game needed to be played in a different way. Virat was at the forefront of the way that the game needed to [be] played. And you look at a guy like Rahul [Dravid], and Rahul managed to change his game to be a little bit more aggressive. I think that had a lot to do with the way that Virat was kind of coming in, and commanding a spot in that middle order. So the guys, you know, [Nos.] 3, 4, 5, and 6 had to really up their game because of the way that Virat was doing things in the nets. And we kind of felt like if the game's going to go in a particular direction, it's going to go in this direction.

du Plessis: It might sound like I'm saying it because it's Virat Kohli, but honestly, he was my favourite guy that I batted with. For a couple of reasons.

Steyn: Clearly, a thousand [939] runs between you guys in 2023.

du Plessis: One is batting at Chinnaswamy is an amazing thing to [do] because it's the crowd and everything. But with Virat, there's an electricity when you bat with him. An intensity that's [up] here. Similar to AB [de Villiers] in the sense that his intensity is ten out of ten.

So when you walk out to bat with him, you feel like, wow, I'm charged up for this. Like, [someone] hold me back. I'm gonna run. And [to] describe it, it's like running through a brick wall. I remember every time I hit a boundary, I would punch his hand so hard because I'm like, come on, come on, let's go. Because you're in it. So it's the crowd and him together, for me, and batting with him would be one of the highlights of my career, because looking at him, [in the context of] playing for South Africa, he was like what AB would have been for a lot of people from the outside. Just to bat with a great of the game is a very rare thing that not a lot of people would experience in their life. So to be able to have batted with him, or even from a captaincy perspective, talk about him, so that whole three years for me would go down as such a cool period of my life.

du Plessis: Do you know what I remember from that [2018 South Africa-India] series? The standout from that specific match [Johannesburg 2018] and the series thereafter was that I could see visibly in the Indian team that his leadership made them harder, tougher.

Steyn: Well, there was always talk about them coming to South Africa and being soft. And I remember that Test match when it was a messy wicket. The one where Dean [Elgar] got hit on the head in Jo'burg. And a lot of their batters got hit like popping off a length, hitting their gloves. And they showed nothing.

du Plessis: They didn't complain to the umpires. And why? Because they were ahead in the Test match. It was the hardest-looking Indian team that I've seen come to South Africa. We were like [saying to the umpires], but see, it's dangerous for them. And they're like, no, but they're not complaining. Because we were behind [in the Test], we're like, but Dean's getting hit on the [head] - and it's like, they're getting hit on the glove. [The umpires said] it's not that bad if they're not doing anything [or complaining].

India won that Test match and it was because of that. Otherwise, it should have actually been called off. But it was obviously a Virat Kohli thing. [He said], 'Guys, we're not gonna step back here. We're gonna front up'. Also physically, you could see the transition in the different Indian teams. Like, he brought an element of fitness into the team. That also became a visible thing. He probably started it, right?

Steyn: A hundred per cent it was him who started it. I mean, even when I met him, he was chubby-cheeked, and you look at him today and he is front and centre in terms of how things are being done and why everybody else leads in that same direction. But where do you rank him in terms of captaining for India?

du Plessis: Like, what he did, in terms of what leadership is, it's inspiring, it's lifting people to a level that they haven't been to.

Steyn: He lifted them to a win rate of 60%.

du Plessis: Overseas record, I think, is the key. Because India was always unbelievable at home, right? But it was always a question mark when they came to South Africa. South Africa get on top of them. And it's his overseas record that, for me, I don't know, but I'm assuming it's very good.

Steyn: He's the first captain to win a series in Australia for India. And you know the history between India and Australia. It's longer than us.

du Plessis: Because we can say we've done it as well. In order to win in Australia, you have to be hard as nails. if you're a little bit soft, they bully you, they dominate you. So he would have been the main guy who would have changed that for them.