Wanted: Rohit with IPL touch

Rohit Sharma won five titles with Mumbai Indians but leading India at a T20 World Cup is a more complicated task

MELBOURNE: Captaincy comes with a shelf life. No one is above it. Except, Rohit Sharma perhaps knew the probable expiration date of his job. It’s the ODI World Cup next year, not because it caps the four-year World Cup cycle when teams generally undergo a makeover but because Sharma would be 37 by the time the 2024 T20 World Cup dawns upon us. It’s becoming a young man’s game and KL Rahul, 30, has been groomed for this position for a long time now.

Whether the BCCI intended it or not, Sharma has been a captain-in-waiting for years till it almost seemed it won’t come his way. And unlike Virat Kohli who for a good seven years was continuity personified exuding a no-questions-asked vibe, Sharma was finally handed captaincy with very little wiggle room—barely two years. That equals two World Cups in ICC’s vocabulary these days. To India, it translates to a chance of finally sealing their credentials as T20 exponents and winning another World Cup at home. Sharma is expected to deliver both. There is no clear long-term strategy propping this expectation, just probability and some comforting numbers. Sharma got Mumbai Indians five IPL trophies; how can he not win at least one T20 World Cup?

It’s an apples-and-oranges comparison at best. Carving a world-beating eleven out of a pool of almost 30 players is more arduous than winning a twomonth IPL with a squad of world-class freelancers and handpicked local talent. For years, Lasith Malinga was Mumbai Indians’ undisputed slog overs bowler before Jasprit Bumrah took over. In Trent Boult, they found a left-arm opening incision like no other while Kieron Pollard is the marauder with bucket hands and a reassuring presence. From Sachin Tendulkar to Sanath Jayasuriya, Ambati Rayudu to Jos Buttler, Harbhajan Singh to Zaheer Khan and Hardik Pandya to Suryakumar Yadav, Mumbai Indians is an illustrious wagon wheel of talent and skills that gets on the road for two months every year. Sharma has been in charge of this show since 2013.

Now to the India team. Here too you have a creed of high-performing IPL players, but trying to keep pace on an endless treadmill of bilateral series throughout the year while selectors and coaches rotated, chopped and changed in search of the perfect 15. They finally seemed to get there, only for the plans to be undone by injuries to Ravindra Jadeja and Bumrah. Sharma is also in charge of this show, but only since last November.

A captain is said to be as good as his team. So can this Indian squad, in all fairness, be even compared to the best-ever Mumbai Indians squad to win the IPL? No, because the tournament, selection criteria and personnel availability vary on many levels. It isn’t therefore right to compare franchise cricket with a World Cup, burden Sharma with his own success and overcomplicate his rite of passage. Mumbai Indians have won the IPL five times also because they take losses on their chin and move on—only this season did they lose eight matches in a row. Rarely does that kind of failure go unnoticed at the international level.

But Sharma is a fantastic leader. He is calm, tactically astute, doesn’t have an overbearing presence, marshals his resources extremely well and is always switched on. Bringing Mohammed Shami out of cold storage and straightaway asking him to bowl the last over in the warm-up win against Australia takes more than guts. Rohit Sharma, the captain, gets all the credit there, and some more. It’s about beating the odds. And for argument’s sake, Sharma has that more often than anyone in the IPL. Even when he wasn’t India captain, it was believed he could do a better job than Kohli because Sharma knows how to dig Mumbai Indians out of a hole and win the IPL.

The only difference is, Sharma was given a long rope at Mumbai

Indians. For good leadership to take effect, a leader has to be given time. He is nevertheless trying to instil a sense of fearlessness in this India team. And that meant not going with the usual flow of things over the past year.

“Look, we’ve decided we will try things,” Sharma said during the Asia Cup where India didn’t even make the final. “Some things may work, some things may not work, but there is no harm in trying. Only if you try things, will you get answers. Along the way, if we make mistakes or face difficulties, we’re okay with that. We have spoken about it as a group, and there is nothing to fear.”

That state of mind shows in his batting as well as he is coming off the blocks faster than usual. Never in consecutive years has he scored more than in 2021 (424 runs) and 2022 (540 runs). Sharma’s batting has a sense of occasion too, in being more prolific in major events like the World Cup or the Champions Trophy. This time though, there is an added rider of leading the team in a World Cup. “Obviously the motive and the whole thought process is to win the World Cup, but we know that we need to do a lot of things right to get there, so one step at a time for us,” he told bcci.tv on Wednesday. “We can’t think too far ahead. You really cannot think about semis and finals from now itself, you just need to focus on each team that you are going to come against and try to do your best and prepare well against each team and make sure we move in the right direction.”

Sharma is a man in the here and now, acutely aware of the hope and desperation with which an entire country clings to his words. He also doesn’t give up. It was a baffling time, watching a man of his talent struggle to seal a Test place for so long. Suddenly it was corrected to such an extent he was not only leading across three formats but also expected to win a World Cup within months of his appointment. Why? Because there is a firm belief that only Rohit Sharma can.

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