Former India coach Ravi Shastri said that when he saw Rohit Sharma getting bored batting in the middle order in Tests, he pushed the player to the top of the order. Shastri was talking about the time when he was the head coach of the Indian cricket team during 2017-2021, where Rohit became of the best aggressive starters in the longest format from 2019 onwards.
“Batting at four, five, this guy used to get bored. Then I started dwelling on the fact, why is he so successful in one-day cricket? He likes to be out there early. I said, if he can go out there and do it, he has got enough time on his hands to play the quicks. He’s got the shots against the quicks, to take them on. The field is up, so Test cricket might be a honeymoon for him if he starts embracing it,” Shastri said in the ICC Review.
“He’d batted enough at five and six and he wasn’t here and he wasn’t there. He would get his 20s or 30s and throw it away. (I thought) let’s put him under pressure and send him up (the order). And I remember telling him in the West Indies ‘we want you to open’. This (decision) was (August) 2019, if I’m not mistaken, after that World Cup. He’d had a great World Cup, so his form was very good. And he might have thought of it for a little while, but he was OK. Then he came in for the first Test match and he opened the innings and he got a hundred. If I’m not mistaken, he got a big 100 in that first innings and then he didn’t look back because then he seemed to enjoy it,” added Shastri.
Rohit was an instant success, hitting twin centuries in his first Test at the top of the order against South Africa.
He recently called time on his Test career after an illustrious career spanning 67 games, which saw him score 4,301 runs including 12 centuries and 18 half-tons.
(With agency inputs)