Kane Williamson: Spoke to Virat Kohli a day before announcing international retirement

FILE PHOTO: Kane Williamson said he has shared multiple life experiences with Virat Kohli almost at the same time and has a special relationship with him. | Photo Credit: AP

New Zealand great Kane Williamson consulted India’s Virat Kohli among other close people a day before announcing his international retirement earlier this year.

Williamson ended his 16-year-long international career with 9515 Tests runs, 7256 in ODIs, and 2575 T20I runs. He also led New Zealand for several years, clinching the inaugural 2021 World Test Championship final being a major highlight. He also captained New Zealand to the finals of 2021 T20 World Cup and 2019 ODI World Cup.

“I spoke to a number of people I trust, and I’ve been really close with. And then I actually had a 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 and Williamson have been friends for a long time, and contemporaries, making the former’s inputs 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.

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“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 just connect over it. 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, its time,” said Williamson.

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.”

“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 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.