Leaving the ball not Sharma’s forte, opening could backfire
Rohit Sharma is the best ODI opener in the world. It would be hard to find anyone who would disagree with that. Five centuries in this year’s World Cup, alongside three scores of 200+ before that have cemented his place among the all-time greats in the format.
But the upcoming Test series against South Africa could see India turn to Sharma as an opener in the longest format for the first time and against a quality red-ball attack.
Sharma’s relative difficulties in transferring his white ball skills to Tests have been welldocumented, though it should be noted that his average of 39.62 from 27 Tests is far from disastrous—he is being judged against his own stratospherically high standards. He has been in and out of the team since his debut in 2013 and never quite nailed down the spot in the middle order.
On the face of it, there is little to suggest that Sharma can become a Test opener, based on his record up to now. If India have not rated him highly enough as a middle order batsman to pick him in their last three Tests, it’s hard to identify what the selectors have seen to make them think he will work as an opener.
Sharma has only opened three times in his first-class career for Mumbai, and not at all since 2012.
On all three occasions, he did not start the game as an opener, batting the first innings down the order before being promoted in the second innings when the match had fizzled out. In short, opening in red-ball cricket has never been Sharma’s primary role.
During India’s tour to Australia in 2018-19, the last series in which Sharma featured for his country in whites, no top six batsman for the visitors left a lower percentage of balls than him.
Those white ball instincts to get bat on ball make him easy on the eye and relatively effective as a lower order stroke-maker, but not ideal for an opening batsman.
Of course, players can adapt to different roles, and Sharma might find a way to adjust his approach when he’s moved to the top of the order, but the recent examples of him being able to build long innings have been sparse. He has not faced more than 200 balls in an innings since 2013, in his debut Test match.
There is recent precedence in international cricket of teams trying to bring white ball openers into the Test arena. England’s experiment with Jason Roy in the Ashes ended with him being first dropped to No 4 and then left out of the team altogether for the final Test of the series.
Sharma might possess a more compact, traditional technique than Roy, so the parallel is not identical, but India should nonetheless be wary of Roy’s inability to transfer his skills across to the longer format, against a high-quality pace attack.
Further similarities exist in the reasons for both Roy’s and Sharma’s ascent to the position of Test opener. The paucity of other options, coupled with the feeling that players of that level of talent demand selection, in any way possible. It’s a view that is easy to sympathise with on an emotional level, but one that has little chance of succeeding on paper.
Sharma’s technique will be under the microscope more than ever before, against one of the strongest pace attacks in world cricket. If the gamble pays off, it could be a thrilling gamechanger for India, but if it fails, they run the risk of compromising the talents of their white ball king.