Rohit’s biggest contribution has come in helping seed the idea within India’s batting consciousness that your wicket is worth less to the team than it is to you
Andrew Fidel Fernando19-Feb-20251:23
What are Rohit and Kohli’s roles in this Indian unit?
Some batters dine out on bilateral fixtures. Some take special pleasure in pummelling subpar opposition into the dirt. Rohit Sharma does all that and has the ODI double-hundreds to show for it.But he’s also a big-tournament monster.For a player once accused of making only cheap runs, Rohit has carved an extraordinary career arc. In ODIs, the format in which he is unquestionably a great, there is no global tournament in which he has not written his name.Remember India’s run in the 2013 Champions Trophy in England? Rohit was powering India through the front end of that thing, hitting back-to-back fifties against South Africa, then West Indies. By tournament end, he was the second-highest run-scorer in the champion team. In the 2017 version of the Champions Trophy, he cracked 304 runs in five innings, outdone only by Shikhar Dhawan.Related
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Rohit reminds us, and perhaps himself, that he isn't done just yet
And then there are the ODI World Cups. Pour yourself a beverage, sit in your favourite chair, load up the Rohit World Cup highlights, and let yourself be transported to a universe in which only the very middle of this man’s bat exists. (You may need a cold shower afterwards.)In 2019, it was easier to list the matches in which Rohit score a hundred. Six times in nine innings, he crossed fifty, and on five of those occasions, he reaped hundreds, gobbling up attacks so greedily you can imagine him patting himself on the belly and settling in for a nap at the close of play. In 2023, he was captain and gave himself the task of plundering runs against the new ball and shaking oppositions out of their plans, as India charted another path to another one-day final. By these standards, 2015 was a disappointment; our man averaged a 47.14.You look through this record and a question begins to bubble up. Could Rohit be India’s best contemporary ODI batter in ICC tournaments? There is no need to open up hostilities with the Virat Kohli fans of course, and Kohli has the greater body of work, having memorably played a role in India’s 2011 triumph. But if you’re a Rohit fan, and you’re in a contrarian mood, you could do worse than check out this table. Kohli averages 64.55 in World Cups and Champions Trophies, but Rohit isn’t far behind on the average front (58.74). His strike rate of 99.03 is almost ten points up on Kohli, though.Will the 2025 Champions Trophy be Rohit’s last big ODI tournament?•ICC/Getty ImagesAnd that strike rate is the key to understanding modern-day Rohit. Of all his considerable achievements, his major contribution may be helping seed the idea within India’s batting consciousness that your wicket is worth less to the team than it is to you. For Rohit, batters are most effective when they cast off egos and play cricket unfettered. A bowling team may get more India wickets, but every time a batter falls, the one that replaces them at the crease is prepared to crash boundaries and puncture the opposition’s delight. Batters won’t pad their stats this way. But India will post more match-winning totals.”I’ve seen it in the recent past, where even without scoring a hundred, teams have managed to get a par score or above-par score,” Rohit said on the eve of India’s first Champions Trophy match, against Bangladesh. “Everyone wants to chip in, or has chipped in. That will be our focus. We will not be looking at individual milestones and stuff like that. Whoever the guys who are in there have to do the job, and the guy going in after that has to do the job as well. If seven or eight of us think like that, we will end up getting the score we are looking for.”We sit, right now, on the edge of what is likely Rohit’s last big ODI tournament. Players in their mid-to-late 30s are infamously prickly about the date of their retirement. But by 2027, when the next ODI World Cup is set to be played, Rohit will be pushing 40.What will be fun to watch in this tournament is how far Rohit will take his aggression. He is a World Cup-winning India captain now, albeit in the shortest format. Perhaps that will unshackle him even further. And by extension, perhaps that whole India batting order.
