Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s masterstroke came at the start of 2013, which led to the birth of the “Hitman”, as the world knows him today. Dhoni was a great believer in Rohit’s ability and realised, some might say a little late, that both he and the team would benefit from the right-hander being given first bite at the cherry, so to say. The opening slots were hardly up for grabs until then, it must be remembered. When Rohit broke through, Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir were all firmly entrenched, and it was impossible to look beyond them. By the beginning of 2013, though, Tendulkar had retired, and the two Delhi batters were on the downswing.
Dhoni’s immense faith in Rohit’s capabilities, the logjam in the middle order, his own travails while walking into an older ball and the gaping holes at the top of the batting tree, all combined to catapult Rohit to the opener’s status. It wasn’t quite the last throw of the dice as might have been six years later, when he was promoted as Test opener, but going out to bat against a brand new ball, with field restrictions in place, worked out beautifully for him and his team, just as Dhoni’s impeccable intuition had predicted.
The runs flowed by the bushel – attractive, dominating, muscular runs, without a hint of power or crudity. Rohit gracefully rode on the back of his excellent basics, exploiting the new freedom accorded to him, and erected one striking edifice after another.
“Rohit is someone who hits through the line against the fast bowlers,” VVS Laxman observes, deconstructing the white-ball behemoth. “When he was going in at number five or number six, he wouldn’t get that opportunity (to hit through the line) because the ball was already old and the field well spread. But when he became an opener – a great decision by MS, I must say, and (coach Duncan) Fletcher – he was able to play his natural game and he was getting value for his shots, because he was always a boundary and six-hitter. He was not someone who believed a lot in singles.
“His first instinct was always a six or a four. And if that didn’t happen, okay, he looked for singles. But even his singles were not so much with soft hands but always hitting the pockets, with full-fledged drives or backfoot cuts. His intention and instinct were always to hit a six or a four.”
Warming to the theme, Laxman continues, “With the field restrictions, he was able to get that space, the ball coming on to the bat. As a batter, he enjoyed the ball coming onto the bat and that’s why I was not surprised he got lots of runs in Australia in the tri-series in 2008 even though he was batting in the middle order. With personal experience, I can say that those are the pitches where he would flourish because the ball would come on nicely and he just had to time the ball. Once he started to open, the pace on the ball helped him. He was able to get hundreds. I believe that is something which happened with Sachin also. When you are batting at number four, five and six, even in One-Day cricket, how many hundreds can you get? But as an opener, Sachin started getting hundreds and so did Rohit after him.
“And then, Rohit started getting double hundreds. That’s because of the nature of his game, the ability to hit good balls for sixes, and the fact that he knew he had that ability. He also had the confidence that he was playing proper cricketing shots and that by following his natural instinct of being aggressive and a boundary hitter, he could actually put a lot of pressure on the opposition bowlers.”
While Rohit thrived on pace on the ball, it was his preparation and improvement against spin that truly impressed Laxman. “His game against the spinners really improved drastically,” he opines. “You can see that from the areas in which he started scoring as his career progressed. It was not only from extra-cover to mid-wicket. As his career blossomed, he was able to access the square pockets on both sides. Like, he was going late and playing the cut shot through the point region, and then he started to sweep. He can play the slog sweep, he can play the normal conventional sweep, and in the last two years or so, he has started playing the reverse sweep also. That shows that he was always looking for ways to score quickly, to put the bowler under pressure, to call the shots, to let everyone know who the boss was.”
Once his first hundred – as an ODI opener – came against Australia in October 2013, the floodgates well and truly opened. Rohit was now secure in the knowledge that he was no longer an experimental opener – the slot was his for keeps. That triggered an astonishing run of consistency as he and Dhawan gave India the starts that Virat Kohli and the others could build on. Kohli rightly went on to be recognised as the ultimate “chase master”, but much of it had to do with the platforms laid by Rohit and Dhawan, who had that uncanny understanding that doesn’t come easily.
The first of Rohit’s double hundreds came less than a year after he opened the batting, also against the Aussies, in Bengaluru in November 2013. It was a breathtaking exhibition of the magical mayhem Rohit could unleash. His 209 that evening might have been the first of his double tons but everyone knew for certain that it wouldn’t be his last.
Not by a long shot.
Excerpted with permission from The Rise of the Hitman: The Rohit Sharma Story, R Kaushik, Rupa Publications.
