While Indian fans loved the sight of an Indian player sledging the Australians back, an unimpressed match referee Ranjan Madugalle summoned Kohli to his cabin. The superstar batter tried to play down the situation by calling it a simple banter, before Madugalle tossed up the cover image of a newspaper. Kohli straightaway asked the Sri Lankan to not ban him. "Yeah, the one thing I remember most is when I'd had enough of the Australian crowd at Sydney and I just decided to flick a finger at them. 'I'm so cool'. The match referee called me to his room the next day and I'm like, 'What's wrong?'. He said, 'What happened at the boundary yesterday?'. I said, 'Nothing, it was a bit of banter'," Virat Kohli had said during an interview with Wisden. "Then he threw the newspaper in front of me and there was this big image of me flicking on the front page and I said, 'I'm so sorry, please don't ban me," he added. 'Ranjan Madugalle was a nice guy, I got away with that one' The match referee slapped Virat Kohli with a fine of 50 percent of his match fee. Kohli recalled that Ranjan Madugalle let him go probably because he realised I was a youngster, and flicked his middle finger in the heat of the moment. "I got away with that one. He was a nice guy, he understood I was young and these things happen," Kohli said. "I really laugh at a lot of the things I did when I was younger but I'm proud that I did not change my ways because I was always going to be who I am and not change for the world or for anyone else. I was pretty happy with who I was," Kohli concluded. 12 years later, Virat Kohli is gearing up for his fifth Test tour of Australia as arguably the greatest batter of the generation. In 2018-19, Kohli also became the first Asian captain to lead his team to a Test series win in Australia.