Virat Kohli’s love for football is well known. The India and Royal Challengers Bangalore captain has been seen on numerous occasions swapping his cricket bat for football boots. A couple of days back, RCB had shared a picture of Kohli playing football with his teammates, captioning it, “We heard Messi was looking for some new teammates”. While Kohli might be light years away from Lionel Messi’s extraordinary footballing talents, he’s no muck with the ball at his feet. On Tuesday, the RCB Twitter handle posted a video of the team’s stars playing a “modified football” match, which saw Kohli being pitted against AB de Villiers.

“Kicking off the IPL season with a football match has been a tradition at RCB for many years. It was all smiles in the camp when AB’s Cool Cats took on Virat’s Hot Dogs,” RCB captioned the video.

In the video, RCB’s Strength and Conditioning coach Shanker Basu reveals that playing football on the inaugural day when the full squad comes out together is an RCB tradition.

Basu said that the game was a “modified football” match where there is no goalkeeper. However, the RCB coach made his dislike for cricketers playing football amply clear.

“Let me put on record, I hate football for cricketers. It’s highly injurious, I can only see risk and don’t see any reward,” said Basu.

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Watch the entire video here:

Kicking off the IPL season with a football match has been a tradition at RCB for many years. It was all smiles in the camp when AB’s Cool Cats took on Virat’s Hot Dogs.#PlayBold #IPL2020 #WeAreChallengers #Football pic.twitter.com/W8F8vmVocw

— Royal Challengers Bangalore (@RCBTweets) September 8, 2020

RCB will be looking to break their IPL trophy jinx this year. They have finished runners-up twice but have never been able to get their hands on the trophy. Kohli and his teammates will raring to go and put the record straight.

The Bangalore franchise get their IPL 2020 campaign underway on September 21 with a tricky fixture against SunRisers Hyderabad at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium.