India’s star player KL Rahul got up close and personal with television presenter and commentator Suhail Chandhok in the fifth episode of ‘The Mind Behind. Red Bull athlete, KL Rahul revealed how he is spending time amidst the lockdown, his experience playing for RCB, and his formative years in the cricket field, who he’d pick to bat for his life and much more in this fifth episode of ‘The Mind Behind.’
Talking about how he is spending his time amidst lockdown, Rahul said: “Me and my family are in Bangalore. We’re all safe. I’m just trying to do whatever I can, in terms of training and keeping busy. I haven’t been or haven’t really got to a place where it’s annoying, I’m hanging in there! But yeah, it is quite nice to spend time at home and I remember when we kept playing (the team) for so long, all of us kept wanting a break, and now that we’ve got such a big break, we are like we don’t want such a big break.
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“I guess that’s what this time is teaching all of us; the important things in life, the importance of being healthy and spending time with family. I got to spend my birthday with my family after a long, long time, so that felt very special.”
Asked if he could change any match, Rahul said: “It has to be the World Cup semi-final. I think most of us are still not over that loss, it is still haunts us sometimes. I can’t imagine what the senior players must have felt but you know in a World Cup it just becomes even harder and knowing that we played so well in the entire tournament. Yeah, so, you I still wake up to that nightmare sometimes!”
Asked if he had to pick one cricketer to bat for his life, Rahul said: “I’ll go with Virat (Kohli) because I know, everybody knows he is a great player. We share a great friendship and he will give it all to save my life.”
Going back to his formative years, Rahul was asked to describe his exact moment where he scored a phenomenal 100 in Sydney.
“I think that innings, that series just changed the way I looked at myself, the confidence that I got from bouncing back so quickly and at an international stage, where, you know it’s a dream for every player, was incredible. I realized that, you know, if I put my mind to it, there are things that I can achieve, that even I had never thought I could. So that innings did give me a great deal of confidence and it just changed who I was as a person and as a cricketer.”
Commenting on social media and how it affects his family, sister or parents and stuff like that: “I think that’s when you get affected the most. And as players when you see that your family’s getting hurt, is when you start to react or you start to feel bad. But yeah, I’m hopeful that people will realize that end of the day, we are people as well. We are trying hard, we do the best, we are having sleepless nights, working ourselves for eight hours, 10 hours a day, sometimes staying away from family, and, you know, going through everything.”