Rohit Sharma reveals his captaincy philosophy: 'I wanted to bring about certain change...'
Rohit Sharma reveals his captaincy philosophy: 'I wanted to bring about certain change...'
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India captain Rohit Sharma has opened up on his captaincy stint which has seen the national side achievement many great things, however, the ICC title eluded them on three occasions. Under Rohit’s leadership, India reached the semi-finals of 2022 T20 World Cup and lost in the finals of World Test Championship and ODI World Cup in 2023. They, however, at one stage were the No. 1 side across all formats.
Rohit said that captaining India has been a “draining” yet “privileged” experience.
“It is quite draining, but that is what you sign up for. When you take the responsibility, I think when the opportunity came to me to lead the team, I was excited. In the last 7-8 years, I’ve been part of that core group decision-making, vice-captain. I led in Virat’s absence a few times when he was not there, but yeah, obviously it’s a huge honour to be captaining your country. You know, I have seen many greats who have captained the team stalwarts in their way, so to be alongside them, you know, it’s a great honour. Great privilege,” he said while speaking to Dinesh Karthik on JioCinema.
“The last three years have been great. Except winning the finals of ICC trophies, we have won everything. That’s one thing we’ve not been able to accomplish, but I think time will come. All we need to do is stay in a good mindset, not worry too much about the past, because you can’t change the past. What you can change is what is going to come next, so all of us are quite focussed on that. We are playing our hearts out. There’s a culture of playing in this team that I was focussing on and am still focussing on.”
Elaborating further on the sort of change he wanted to bring in as a captain, Rohit said that his aim was to take the “statistical side of cricket out of this team”.
“I wanted to bring about certain change, players going out there and playing with a lot of freedom. I wanted to take the statistical side of cricket out of this team. People are not looking at numbers, people are not looking at their personal scores, just playing the game. Numbers will take care of themselves if we play well, if the mind is clean and clear and we don’t go out there only looking for a 50 or 100. Obviously, these numbers are good, and they will happen, but you take that out of your mind, just focus on the game and enjoy the atmosphere within the group, enjoy the camaraderie we’ve created in the group. For me, that’s the most important thing,” he shared.
“Numbers are overrated. In India we do talk a lot about numbers and all of that. I got five hundreds in the 2019 World Cup, but we still lost. The hundreds don’t matter. I may think about them may be 20 years later after I retire, but what did we get? I wanted the trophy. If you don’t win trophies, I don’t think those 5-6 hundreds make too much sense. Team sport is all about winning trophies, not about individual accomplishments.”
