The task is cut out for the new India captain Rohit Sharma in One-Day Internationals and T20 Internationals. The explosive opening batsman, who has been a part of the Indian team across formats for the last one decade, has seen enough failures to identify problem areas where he wants his team to work on. In clear terms, Rohit wants the Indian cricket team’s batsmen to be prepared for the worst.
While India appeared in the two semifinals of in the last as many 50 over World Cups, in 2015 and 2019, on both the occasions they were let down by a flurry of wickets at the top of the order.
In the contest particularly against New Zealand in the ICC World Cup 2019, India lost their batting strength in the form of Rohit, Virat Kohli and KL Rahul for cheap and went on to lose the game as well. Even in their crucial ICC T-20 World Cup 2021 opening match against Pakistan, India failed to recover after Rohit and Rahul — the two best batsmen as per their form — were dismissed early on in the contest.
The same was the story in the final of the ICC Champions Trophy 2017 when India lost the likes of Dhawan, Kohli and Rohit early in a big chase against Pakistan, and could never recover.
Rohit Sharma has taken over the captaincy responsibilities from Virat Kohli in ODI and T20 cricket. The immediate task for Rohit will be to identify the best players for the shortest format whereas get the best out of the resources that are available for him in 50-over cricket.
But he was resting during the recent India versus New Zealand test series, Rohit appeared in a talk show Backstage with Boris and said.
“I would say it was that initial phase of the game where we lost the game. So that’s something I’ll keep in mind and see that we prepare for the worst. We have to prepare when the team is 10 for 3. That’s how I want to move forward and get the message across to the boys that guys who are batting at Nos. 3, 4, 5, 6, there’s nowhere written that if you are 10 for 2 or 3 [in a T20I], you can’t get 180 or you can’t get 190, or maybe more.
“I want the guys to prepare in that fashion. Let’s say we are playing the semi-final and we are 10 for 2 in the first two overs, what do we do? What is the plan? I want to put ourselves in that situation again and see if we can respond to that. We have got some games before the World Cup to try and test that out. Because if you look there is a similarity between all three games that we lost — two Pakistan games and one New Zealand game in three ICC tournaments.”
“I do understand that the quality of the bowling was exceptional at that point, but it has happened three times. I hope that it doesn’t happen for the fourth time. So hopefully we will prepare for that, keeping that situation in mind and move forward and see how we can plan — whether we can just counterattack straight from ball one, whoever batter goes in,”
Rohit said.