Whether India skipper Rohit Sharma will be included in the starting XI for New Year’s Test against Australia at Sydney is still unknown according to India coach Gautam Gambhir.
“The head coach is here. It is enough,” Gambhir told the media assembled that why was Rohit not in the pre-match media.
Rohit himself had missed it too, ahead of the third Test at Brisbane – Shubman Gill was in the press then – but his reason there was that he had missed the mandatory training session at the Gabba where the press conference was being held. It was optional Thursday’s practice session at the SCG, too, but Rohit was on the ground, the morning before a Test match India need to lose to tie the series and win the Border-Gavaskar Trophy.
So the question was: is Rohit OK? “It is all good Rohit,” Gambhir said.
And when asked again whether Rohit would play he added: “We’re going to take a look at the wicket and announce it [the XI] tomorrow. There was the first spark.
Rohit has been in the wrong shape. He’s an average of 10.93 in his last nine Tests and only 6.2 this series. He came late to India’s training session on Thursday. Technically it was an optional session, so maybe don’t make too much of that but everyone was there.
Gill who did not play in the XI for the MCG Test was among the first batting lines of the SCG nets. One of them was Dhruv Jurel, who hasn’t played since the first Test in Perth; it was one of the only times he’s been paired with the first-XI players. Jasprit Bumrah opened the doors to the members pavilion and made a beeline straight to Gambhir for a chat.
No Rohit at the nets, however. He had been on the main arena playing foot-volleyball, and then gone. Only after the other batted for an hour did Rohit walk out to bat alongside them, without kit, just sweatshirt and shorts. He walked down to the team analyst, Hari. Then Bumrah joined the two. This had occurred at the MCG too. Rohit took his time getting to the outdoor nets and played for an extended period of time against only throwdowns. The only difference was in Melbourne he was there for the press conference too.
He got a light 40-minute knock against the fielding coach T Dilip and throwdown wizard Daya off the sidearm at the SCG. The other regular-season starters had been replaced by now. Rohit was on the bat along with Tanush Kotian and Abhimanyu Easwaran. And then there were the times when he looked good, pull shot from the front foot for instance, the times when he was looking good, the times when he was having fun, the excuse for throwing a throwback down the ground had him grinning from ear to ear, and the times when he batted like an amateur, the one off stump he left.
Rohit, who’d said at the end of the Brisbane Test that he wasn’t hitting his shots as good but he was still making every thing count that he could.
“I am okay, as long as my brain, body, feet are moving, that’s good, I’m not too worried about it,” Rohit had said two weeks back. “You can sometimes see those numbers and you know it’s been a while he has hit big runs. But for somebody like me, I guess it’s really about what I feel inside my head.”
But in Melbourne he found some form, or rather a lot more belief in himself, holding up to an era of Pat Cummins’s ‘almost perfect’ bowling on his end. Australia were on the lookout for his outside edge, he refused them for the first hour, but then he made them pay by scoring a flick shot from far range that was picked off by the gully-fielder.
“As a batter, too, lots of the things I’m trying to do are not coming together where I would like them to come together,” Rohit said after India lost the series 2-1. “But on the brain, it’s distressing no doubt.” – Dan. Media reports claimed Rohit already planned to retire after the Sydney Test, then it became questionable, was he already planning to retire, could he not retire now while the series is still on the table?
India never declare XI on the night before a Test match but Gambhir not announcing Rohit in the XI was bizarre. The captain comes in, doesn’t he? Isn’t it he who selects the players, not the other way round? This is a year that has started with a lot of excitement for India.