Rohit Sharma returns to Champions Trophy, where the ODI opener was born
Having reinvented his batting template, the Indian captain is expected to stick to his high scoring tempo
Mumbai: Between his debut in 2007 and January 2013, Rohit Sharma played 86 ODIs and scored 1978 runs at an average of 30.43. Ordinary numbers for a batter of his talent. And many fans would ask for his axing on a regular basis.
Then, MS Dhoni decided that having Rohit bat lower down the order (at No.6) was a waste. So just ahead of the 2013 Champions Trophy, the skipper asked the right-hander from Mumbai to start opening the innings.
“I believe the decision to open in ODIs changed my career and it was a decision taken by Dhoni. I became a better batsman after that,” Rohit said in 2017.
“He (Dhoni) just came up to me and said “I want you to open the innings as I am confident that you will do well. Since you can play both the cut and pull shot well, you have the qualities to succeed as an opener”,” Rohit added. “He told me that I shouldn’t be scared of failures or get upset by criticism. He was looking at the bigger picture as the Champions Trophy was scheduled in England that year.”
If there is one moment that can be described as game-changing, it was this. In the 182 matches since, Rohit has scored 9010 runs at an average of 56.66 with 30 hundreds.
He became one of the most feared batters in the format, and the form even led to him earning a place in Test cricket and then becoming India’s all-format skipper.
But as we approach the Champions Trophy in 2025, 12 years after that switch, Rohit is once again in need of a pick-me-up. He wants to go on his own terms; he wants to play on, but so much will depend on how he performs in the middle — as captain and as opener.
A century in the Cuttack ODI against England would have eased the pressure a bit — 119 runs in 90 balls with 7 sixes — after it ended a spell of 13 low scores. But so much of Rohit’s game is about economy of movement, soft hands, smooth bat flow and gift of timing.
Is it all back?
Now, that is a question that will only be answered in Dubai. Opposition bowlers sense the vulnerability and they go at the Indian skipper a little harder than usual. But Rohit will keep swinging.
“Layenge, layenge (We’ll bring it, we’ll bring it),” a nonchalant Rohit promised a fan before leaving for the Champions Trophy.
His casual demeanour while answering the media notwithstanding, Rohit’s mind is always ticking. He would be thinking about the past and the future. But the only thing that matters is the present.
This Champions Trophy will be his 14th ICC event, of the white-ball variety, and given the conveyer belt of talent in Indian cricket, failure is not an option.
In the only ICC event he missed, the 2011 ODI World Cup, his place was taken up to accommodate an extra leg spinner. In Dubai, future star Yashasvi Jaiswal has been pushed out to squeeze in a mystery spinner.
Batting reinvention
Declining returns or not, Rohit has found a way to reinvent his white-ball batting in the past few years. He topped the scoring charts in the 2019 ODI World Cup with 648 runs at an average of 81 with five hundreds, but then he flipped his template.
From pacing his innings and looking to bat deep, going full throttle only closer to the death overs; in the 2023 ODI World Cup, Rohit would look to score at the rate of knots in the Powerplay.
The move was transformative to India’s fortunes. He scored 401 Powerplay runs, at a S/R of 135, over 11 World Cup innings. The trade-off being that he would only last 43 balls per innings on an average as opposed to 73 balls in the previous World Cup.
But given that he still managed 597 runs in the tournament at an improved S/R of 125, it fitted the bill. The only batter who scored more runs was Virat Kohli. The Indian captain’s quick starts helped Kohli to stick to his tried-and-tested game and control the innings longer.
“The way Rohit bhai has been batting in the ODIs in the past one year and a half it’s been really game-changing for us,” opening partner Shubman Gill recently said. “Taking the momentum right through from the start and taking the game away from ball one, it makes the job of the non-striker and the batsmen coming in a bit easier, and I think it has helped our team a lot.”
Gill is right. In the 2023 World Cup, Rohit was dismissed five times in the Powerplay, only twice more than 2019, despite the risks he took. The Champions Trophy being half the tournament in duration of an ODI World Cup, and the league stage limited to three matches, it will be a riskier ploy.
Without the volume of runs behind him coming into the tournament, Rohit will need some luck to consistently meet targets. But over the course of a long career, the 37-year-old would have learnt that sometimes you have to make your own luck.
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