“Inside the locker room, Kohli once asked Sarfaraz Khan, ‘Sarfu, what’s your shoe size?’ to which Sarfaraz replied, ‘Nine.’ Then he looked at me, and I thought, ‘Oh no, I have to get this right,’ because even if the shoes didn’t fit, I still wanted them,” Nitish said in a chat with Puma podcast.
Bengaluru: Sunrisers Hyderabad all-rounder Nitish Kumar Reddy, a huge fan of Virat Kohli, recalls the moment when he couldn’t resist after the cricket legend offered up a prized pair of his shoes.
“Back in the locker room, he (Kohli) once asked Sarfaraz (Khan), ‘Sarfu, tera size kya hai?’ (Sarfaraz, what’s your shoe size?), and he said, ‘Nine.’ Then he turned to me, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, I have to guess this correctly,’ because even if they weren’t my size, I really wanted his shoes,” Nitish explained in a chat with Puma at a promotional event here.
“I said, ‘10,’ and he gave them to me. In the next match, I wore those shoes and scored a hundred!”, he said.
Nitish, who scored 303 runs and took three wickets in the IPL last season for SRH under Pat Cummins’ captaincy, has also sought advice from Hardik Pandya while impressing on his Bangladesh debut before his BGT heroics.
Nitish revealed that amidst the celebrations of his unforgettable Melbourne century, he found himself searching for just two people.
“Everyone in the dressing room came up and congratulated me, but I was just looking for one guy—hoping he’d come and talk to me. When Virat bhai (Kohli) finally walked up and told me I had played a wonderful game, that moment itself was special for me,” he said. “ I was also scanning the stands for my father but couldn’t find him. Later, I saw on the screen that he was crying,” he added.
Nitish credited both his father and uncle for shaping his cricketing journey, sharing that they were in the stands that day, watching him salute the tricolour in front of 80,000 roaring fans.
On franchise teammate Travis Head, Nitish recalled that the former tried to throw him off with some playful sledging during the Border-Gavaskar Trophy Test series ‘Down Under’.
“Travis came up to me and said, ‘Nitish, where are you going to party tonight?’—knowing fully well that I wouldn’t. Then he went on, ‘Australia is such a great place. Melbourne is an amazing city, you have to go out and chill.’,” Nitish said. “ He was just trying to distract me. I just told him, ‘Okay, Travis, one day we’ll both go and party!’ During another match, he was fielding at short leg and warned me, ‘Nitish, if you hit me, I’ll hit you when you bowl!”,” he said.
