Rohit Sharma’s Test captaincy faces its first huge Test
The Rohit Sharma era as captain of India has been underway for over a year, but has it truly begun?
Since Rohit became India’s all-format captain, the team has struggled to get off the ground in Test cricket, with Rohit missing three of the five matches. Due to injuries, Rohit has missed eight of India’s last ten Test matches. Several months after beating Australia 2-1 in Australia, India grabbed a 2-1 series lead in England. Virat Kohli was named Player of the Match in their penultimate Test before this sequence of games.
As white-ball captain, he has had more chances to contribute, and the team has performed well. Only Hardik Pandya, who has captained India in 11 T20Is, is ahead of Rohit, who has captained India in ten ODIs.
Over the years, Dravid has learned that tournament outcomes define captains and that a poor tournament performance may reverse bilateral successes, especially in white-ball cricket. He may be known as the captain who guided India to a 2007 World Cup group stage loss, but he’ll probably be remembered for making India a world-class ODI chasing squad.
The fact that Rohit replaced Virat Kohli was partly due to the belief that he would lead India to success in major tournaments. Rohit had just won his seventh IPL title as captain of the Mumbai Indians when he took over the white-ball teams, and in the next two years, there would be three ICC trophies up for grabs.
When teams win, the complex story is sometimes oversimplified and replayed with the captain presented as an all-knowing, benevolent mastermind. While player testimonials usually support this concept, people need to consider whether the same squad, with so many other winning components, might have won with a different skipper.
As India’s captain, Rohit was mysterious and charismatic. His captaincy comes under fire after a year in both formats.
Whether or not India lives up to their expectations as favourites for this year’s home World Cup may determine the fate of Rohit’s ODI captaincy. That’s the way things have to be at the moment, unfortunately.
His tenure as Test captain has only begun. Here is the stage where Rohit will lead India in one of the essential Test matches in recent memory. Australia forced India to dig deep into their stores of skill and energy to clinch a 2-1 comeback triumph in the 2016–17 Border-Gavaskar Trophy, making it probably the most excellent Test series India has hosted in this millennium.
Rohit is leading India’s most successful group of Test cricketers at a time when they are all getting on in years. Although much of the difficulty in managing this transition may be out of his hands, it will nonetheless serve as another metric by which he will be evaluated.
So, the Rohit Sharma era might not last long. And if things don’t go well in this series against Australia, India’s chances of making it to the World Test Championship final could be over before they even begin.
