It’s been a decade that Virat Kohli made an international debut and had grabbed headlines for controversies which hounded him at the start of his career. One of them was when he showed a middle finger to the Australian crowd in 2012 after getting irritated with their behaviour at the Sydney Cricket Ground. The Indian captain revealed that match referee Ranjan Madugalle called Virat Kohli in his room the following day and demanded an explanation. Virat Kohli receives a customised kit from Southampton football club

While speaking to Wisden Cricket, Kohli spoke about the incident and said he apologised to Ranjan Madugalle and got away with it. "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. I really laugh at a lot of the things I did when I was younger but I'm proud that I did not change my ways because I was always going to be who I am and not change for the world or for anyone else. I was pretty happy with who I was,” said the 29-year-old.

Kohli also spoke about his childhood coach Rajkumar Sharma and his family members for looking after him during the initial years of cricket. “My coach, Rajkumar Sharma, was always looking at things from the outside and he understood me the most, after my family, because I had interacted him so much over the years. My family as well. Every time they felt like I was not on the right path they told me. But my coach was the one that was very stern with me. If I was doing something wrong he would make sure that he got that across, one way or the other. He was the only person I was scared of when I was growing up. I went into his academy when I was nine and even now I still speak to him about my game,” he explained.

The Indian skipper also went on to say that he wishes to guide the youngsters in the team as he would not want anyone to get suffocated with the kind of mistakes he made. "I look forward to guiding the young guys in the team to not make the same mistakes that probably I made when I was their age because I want them to have three more years of quality cricket compared to going up and down, struggling here and there and then finally finding their feet. If I see someone making the same mistakes that I committed and I cannot correct them, then it's my failure. If I choose to stay quiet I'm not really doing my job. You don't want to suffocate anyone but the mistakes I made early in my career, I would not like to see youngsters make them more than once, because that's just wasting such an important phase of their lives and careers," he said.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Sep 05, 2018 04:01 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).