Moises Henriques has revealed that his first look at a 19-year-old Virat Kohli left him convinced Indian cricket was in trouble. On the Chin Music podcast, the former Australia all-rounder said Kohli struggled on the bowling machine on his first day in Australia, hours after getting off the plane.
It got worse in the turf nets. Kohli bowled what Henriques called dinky-dobbly medium pace off the wrong foot, and Henriques assumed the visit was a goodwill gesture, not the start of a future India captain. A week later, Kohli was pasting the academy’s fast bowlers and spinners with ease.
The struggle Henriques saw on day one was real. Where he saw it is the reason it meant nothing.
“I’ve got a Virat Kohli story from that academy. So Virat Kohli comes over… Nineteen… Just won the nineteen World Cup, I think. Day one off the plane, I’m feeding him balls on the bowling machine and he’s struggling.”
Moises Henriques, Chin Music podcast, October 22, 2026
Moises recalls the time he though Virat Kohli was ‘a community favour’ 😂
#cricket #kohli #viratkohli #chinmusic #india https://t.co/3wUSPjdlGP
— Fanatics (@thefanatics) October 22, 2026
Insider Read
A bowling machine gives a batter nothing to read. There is no run-up, no arm and no release point, just a ball fired out of a hole. Good batters time the ball off the bowler’s action, so on a machine even the best of them react late.
Add a long-haul flight and it gets worse. Your legs are heavy, your eyes are slow, and the ball arrives before your body has woken up. Every batter looks ordinary in that first session, so judging Kohli there was judging the flight, not the player.
What Changed in One Week
Henriques put the turnaround down to simple things. Kohli had rested, got used to Australian conditions and stopped caring what other people thought of him. Henriques said he never doubted Kohli again, and believes that first week was a wake-up call that pushed the teenager to get himself organised.
Henriques does not name the academy in the clip, but his timeline matches Kohli’s 2008 trip. That June, Cricinfo reported that Kohli, Pradeep Sangwan and Tanmay Srivastava had won the Border-Gavaskar scholarship, which gave them six weeks at Cricket Australia’s Centre of Excellence in Brisbane.
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