Former New Zealand captain Kane Williamson revealed that he had spoken to several trusted people before announcing his international retirement, but a conversation with Virat Kohli proved particularly meaningful.
Williamson highlighted the similarities between their journeys, including their leadership responsibilities, long careers and experiences of raising children while playing the game. While Williamson played 110 Tests, scoring 9515 runs, Kohli amassed 9230 runs in 123 Tests.
“I spoke to a number of people I trust, and I’ve been really, really close with. And then I actually had a really, 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 the ‘Between the Two Beers’ podcast.
“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. 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 and it and 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, it’s time,” he added.
Further, Williamson disclosed that reaching 10,000 international runs was never a personal target, despite being repeatedly questioned about the milestone in interviews. He argued that defining success through statistics, such as batting averages or centuries, can impose unnecessary limitations on a player’s career.
“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,” he noted.
“Every interview I did, they would ask about it, and they were never the things that drove me; 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,” he concluded.
