Star batter Virat Kohli, who took some brilliant catches against Australia in India’s ODI World Cup 2023 campaign opener in Chennai was given the best fielder award by the fielding coach T Dilip and he celebrated it with full enthusiasm in the dressing room.

Kohli first plucked an excellent catch at the first slip to Mitchell Marsh in third over of the game while diving to his left. He then took a second catch off Adam Zampa on Hardik Pandya’s bowling.

Not only Kohli, Shreyas Iyer also took two superb catches. He ran forward before diving to full length to take the catch of Pat Cummins and then had a running catch to end Mitchell Starc’s innings. Even Ishan Kishan had a good day in the field for India.

“A bit of change with the way we do things. Dilip will hand out the best fielder medal,” Team India head coach Rahul Dravid said, in a video posted by the BCCI on its social media handle.

“At last we got this. In today’s game, Ishan was outstanding. Shreyas was outstanding with his two catches. But something we keep speaking about our team is about consistency, it’s not about one catch,” said Dilip.

“It is about intensity, backing up. It’s not only doing your job but also making sure that you encourage and keep the right fielders at the right place. This one hoes to Virat,” he added.

As soon as the Indian fielding coach called his name, Virat Kohli had a big smile on his face and asked Dilip to put the medal on his neck in the video, which has gone viral on social media. The former India captain was then seen kissing and biting the medal.

Speaking after the game, India captain Rohit Sharma also acknowledged that the fielding was top notch from his side.

“Pretty exciting. Good feeling to come out on top. It was a good game to start the tournament for us. I thought it was magnificent, especially the fielding and we saw the effort from everyone today, conditions like this it would be tough.Our bowlers used the conditions perfectly and we knew there would be assistance for everyone, even the seamers got some reverse, the spinners bowled in the nice areas and all in all it was a great effort,” said Rohit at the post-match presentation.

After an impressive six wicket win over Australia in their first match in Chennai, India will now travel to Delhi to face Afghanistan at the Arun Jaitley Stadium on Wednesday.