KL Rahul opens up about the anxiety he faced from retirement thoughts: ‘I could see the end of the tunnel’

Senior India batter KL Rahul made a candid confession about his contemplation of retirement from cricket. Rahul revealed that while his lifelong dream has been to excel as a cricketer, reaching the age of 30 brought about feelings of unease as he realized his professional playing career may have an expiration date looming ahead.

Rahul has been an integral part of India's ODI and Test set-up for the past few years now and helped the team won several matches with his flamboyant batting. He has shown versatility by performing consistently well both as an opener and middle-order batter in both red-ball and white-ball cricket.

Recently, Rahul shared his thoughts about his future retirement in the podcast and said he is not insecure about it but feels it is ending very quickly for him. The star batter asserted that a fit player can play till 40 in international cricket and stretch it to a couple of years in IPL.

"There is no insecurity, but there is a feeling that all this ends, and for me it ends very quickly. If you are fit enough, you can play till 40. That is the maximum someone has played. Yes, there is MS Dhoni, who is 43 and is still playing. You can play the IPL and all of that, but not at the international level for too long," said KL Rahul on a podcast on Nikhil Kamath's YouTube channel.

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The Karnataka batter also discussed an athlete's short shelf life and the need to make the maximum impact with the limited time during their career.

"There is a fear and realisation that the shelf life is really small for an athlete, and you need to make the most of it within whatever time you have," said the wicketkeeper batter.

The 32-year-old Rahul said that when he hit 30, things started changing for him as he got anxious that he had only 10 more years left in his career, which he felt was not too far away.

"For me, the anxiety was when I hit 30. I could see the end of the tunnel. Till I was 29, I could not see that. Some weird thing happened on my 30th birthday. I could see I have 10 more years to play cricket, and that gave me anxiety, and that is the first time I felt like 'This comes to an end at some point.' All I have done all my life is 'Cricket, Cricket, Cricket,' without imagining this comes to an end. Now I can see it. It is not too far away," he added.

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