World Cup victory is Rohit's emphatic coming of age of his twisting, turning cricketing life

If you had to pick your Rohit Sharma moment from the thousands in the ICC T20 World Cup final, what would it be? Hoisting the World Cup trophy over his head, shouting joyously? Celebrating with his great teammate Virat Kohli, a tricolour draped around their shoulders while holding the Cup? The goofy slow-mo march-up to the podium in step with Suryakumar Yadav? Tricolour in one arm, medal around his neck, daughter on his shoulders, waving? Or even eating a bit of sand off the Kensington Oval pitch later, saying, “I wanted to have a piece of it with me.”

Or was it something more visceral? In the first flush of victory, Rohit dropped to his knees, arms aloft before falling face forward on to the grass, hitting the ground over and over again. Absorbing what he has achieved privately for a few seconds before his mates come piling on to him.

In almost fifty years across 22 multi-format, limited-over World Cups, Rohit Gurunath Sharma is only the third Indian captain to win a cricket World Cup. Seventeen years in an India career which has been a constant tug of war between achievement and adversity, he is now alongside Kapil Dev and Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

It is the greatest triumph of Rohit’s game and personality and, flowing from them, his leadership. It is the culmination of a career where promise and disappointment have walked alongside brilliance and struggle. It is the emphatic coming of age of his twisting, turning cricketing life.

Rohit turned 37 in April. It is easy to forget that 17 years ago, when India won the ICC’s first World T20 (the old name for the T20 World Cup) in 2007, he was there as well. It was months after his ODI debut in Ireland, and this Mumbai under-17 off-spinner turned beauty of a middle-order bat had itched for a game. When it came against South Africa on a spicy wicket, he hooked and pulled the fastest among them to a fifty. A few months later, Rohit was part of India’s CB series triumph in Australia, scoring 66 in the second final. He was marked down by Ian Chappell as the next Sachin Tendulkar. This lazily elegant bat and electric fielder was a star in the making.

Except from then, Rohit’s career with India was marked by fitful success, injuries and strokes of plain bad luck. He was injured in a freak training accident on the eve of a Test debut in Nagpur in 2010. It was only in November 2017 that he could return to the Test team. During that period, the newly-mushrooming social media-verse gave him a pejorative nickname―“Talent”―mocking what was considered wasted potential.

Between Rohit’s debut in June 2007 and the 2024 World Cup final, India played 174 Tests, 407 ODIs and 226 T20Is. Rohit’s personal tally is 59 Tests, 262 ODIs and 159 T20Is. Those missed games―115 Tests, 145 ODIs and 67 T20Is―the source of frustration, dejection and anguish.

Except, Rohit was to find himself in the Indian Premier League, winning the 2009 title with the Deccan Chargers as its middle-order rocket under the captaincy of Adam Gilchrist. After being passed over by Mumbai Indians in the first IPL auction, seasoned Mumbai and BCCI official Ratnakar Shetty recalls Mumbai Indians captain Sachin Tendulkar wanting to “somehow” get this match-winner back home. In 2011, Rohit signed on with Mumbai Indians and reshaped himself and who he was to become to Indian cricket.

The year 2011 was to also mark Rohit’s darkest hour and the start of his personal reboot after missing out on selection for the 2011 World Cup squad. “I figured out that it is just my battle and I shouldn’t be expecting anyone would come and help me,” he told the Indian Express. “That I needed to figure it out on my own… create my own path from my own struggle.”

His captaincy in the IPL, when he won Mumbai Indians its first of five titles in 2013, “was sending a message that he had the game to be a leader,” says Shetty.

When Rohit first made his India debut, says an IPL coach, “that hook and the pull he had, I don’t think many others had that at that time…. He always looked amazing in terms of quality.”

He says Rohit’s strength and adaptability in being able to switch games and gears lie in his grip. “He has a split grip, like [Jacques] Kallis, [Ricky] Ponting and Tendulkar had,” he says. “That is his strength; it helps him manoeuvre the ball on the onside, offside… no restriction where he can hit a ball.”

Coupled with the gift of timing, Rohit appeared to be modelled after a batter like Aravinda de Silva. He can pull the back of length balls and mess with the bowlers’ length. “When you have that, the bowler is constantly trying to make the adjustment to bowl fuller and make half-volleys. Normal length for him was a pull shot and he always had that strength, and that differentiated him from the rest,” says the coach.

The search for a place in a crowded Indian middle-order across formats turned Rohit into opener―from 2009 in T20s and from 2011 in ODIs. The IPL coach laughs at the shift, calling it, “ridiculous” and said he was amused at hearing heated discussions around the search for a No 4 for ODI World Cups after 2011. “Because Rohit was the best No 4 in the world, that is where he batted. But he was not getting a chance in the middle order… When the breakthrough came in the opening slot, he jumped at it.”

Making the switch, said the coach, was “not a big thing―because when you pass a threshold of mastery of batsmanship, then it is the matter of a few balls of adjustment… You just have to make the slight adjustment of opening. The odd ball will move a bit up front and you can manage that from there. Any quality [batter] will be able to do it. I mean, tomorrow you tell Virat [Kohli] to go and open in a Test match, I don’t see an issue. Any top player who has passed the threshold of the mastery of their craft, can do it.”

It is time to address the elephant and have it leave the room: of Rohit as the alter-Virat, with diametrically opposite personalties and career paths. When lined up against Kohli, Rohit is visibly not as streamlined, statistically not as prolific, particularly in Tests, and most certainly not easily slottable into any saleable or marketable brand bracket. But behind these obvious differences and Rohit’s loose-as-a-goose demeanour, lives an undeniable white-ball beast. With three ODI double centuries and five T20I centuries and the most monstrously-successful IPL captaincy alongside Dhoni.

In the list of India’s World Cup-winning captains, Rohit projects neither Kapil Dev’s all-round athletic superpowers nor Dhoni’s icy unflappable cool quotient. And he hates comparisons anyway. When asked to assess Suryakumar’s two-step catch off David Miller against Kapil’s 1983 dismissal of Viv Richards, Rohit protested, “Nahin yaar, leave what happened in 1983 where it belongs. It was a great catch…. Every moment that happens has its own charm, its own way. I am not a big comparison fan.”

It is only fair to respect that and look at Rohit, but not through what he appears on the outside―no sleek contours, all bumps and edges, comfort-fit girth, thinning hair, drawling, languorous speech―but to see him as the leader that he is.

The grace and power of his batting contain an awareness and clarity that carry through to his captaincy born of a fundamental core. Of the competitive Mumbai cricketer from its distant suburbs who wrestled on and off packed local trains with his giant kitbag looking for a game, a chance, an opportunity. Who has little time for its embroideries and its fusses, but remains forever invested in the contest.

The Mumbai cricket community looked after the teenage Rohit: his first coach Dinesh Lad ensured that his school fees were waived; and cricketing guru Vasoo Paranjape pushed to have him picked and played in the Mumbai under-17s, dragging junior national coach Pravin Amre into watching him in a local match. Amre made sure Rohit was given a cricket scholarship. He was picked for India’s squad for the 2006 Under-19 World Cup. Within a year he was playing for India. Within two came the IPL, and its unimagined wealth and mind-altering fame. But Rohit has remained, says Shetty, “good with people, respectful with whoever he deals with”. This equanimity is his calling card.

A former Mumbai cricketer trying to describe him accurately says, “He is what they call a valli cricketer” and laughs. We have heard of the cliched khadoos (grouchy) Mumbai cricketer who will not cede an inch and fight to the death, but valli is a new one. The clue lies in the meaning of the word―valli is Marathi for a climber plant, that grows in random directions, heading off looking for light, room, a spot to find a firm grip.

Valli is slang for the unpredictable, the eccentric, for those who could not care less about anything. Except what matters most to them. Light, space, the search for a grip. One who may appear laid-back and non-confrontational, but will front up in the heat of a fight. “Forget all the fluff, you know, just get stuck in and play the game,” says the former Mumbai cricketer and points out, “One of the keys of a good leader is that he draws performance from his players.”

Rohit’s style is to give his players the leeway to be themselves, but to reprimand when required. As Suryakumar said, “You feel that, in his presence, he wants you to go to the next level. He is pushing himself so much more. So that everyone is now feeling that we should do the same.” Before the World Cup final, he said, Rohit told the team, “I can’t climb this mountain alone. If I have to reach the peak, I will need everyone’s oxygen.”

What had already sent a message down the line was Rohit’s lifting his batting tempo and pace in T20 power play and carrying it into the 2024 World Cup. The IPL’s and Rohit’s seventeenth season had him score more than 400 runs at his highest-ever strike rate of 150. He has never had a better strike rate in any multi-nation event than he did at this World Cup―156.7.

After the crushing disappointment of defeat in the 2022 T20 World Cup semi-final against England, Rohit played in only three T20Is before the June 2024 World Cup.

But just like his friend and Mumbai Indians data analyst C.K.M. Dhananjai had told The Cricket Monthly, Rohit’s resurgence and renaissance in the public eye came from an understanding of his own game. Dhananjai said of 2019: “He knew exactly what was happening with his game. He was able to coach himself…. This is a trait I have seen in only the greatest of players. This ability to heal themselves or coach themselves out of a situation…. They know their game, they know their body, they know their reflexes.”

What is the message that Rohit’s game and body are sending him now? How will Mumbai Indians, who have already removed him from captaincy, handle this and him? In a nervy World Cup final, Rohit’s leadership extracted from Hardik Pandya, his replacement MI captain, a performance for the ages. The bad blood of the IPL season―Pandya being booed by crowds, Rohit fielding in the deep―evaporated at the World Cup. Rohit thought nothing of photobombing a Pandya post-match interview to plant a kiss on his allrounder’s cheek in front of a live global audience. Another first for an Indian World Cup-winning captain whom Sanjay Manjrekar calls, “a champion cricketer with a pure heart”.

How will this languidly developing Rohit epic develop? “What is the legacy he wants to leave behind in Test cricket” asks an Indian cricket insider. “If he thinks about it, Rohit can easily extend his career. But the question is how motivated is he? How much more do you want to play is entirely dependent on you.”

Many believe that Kohli could keep going for another five years. Is that something that Rohit would be keen on even doing?

Again, applying Kohli’s template to Rohit’s career is a mistake. The valli has its own motivations, and it is foolish to believe that it is not aware of where it wants to go.

At his post-victory press conference, Rohit talked of being “so desperate” to win this cup and not suffer defeat in a third straight ICC final in just over 12 months. But in the end, he said, he also believed in destiny. “I believe that what is written is going to happen, and I think this was written,” he said.

It was written that, after a career swinging between soaring and stumbling and soaring again, Rohit would be the captain to give India its second T20 World Cup after 17 years. But he reminds us that between what is written and what has to be experienced in order to read it, lies the mystery and the magic we get entangled in. Rohit quickly disentangles himself from the stars and clarifies, “Of course, before the match, you don’t know that this is what is written.” Then he grins his sunshine grin and describes what he sees without the noise, glitter, smoke and mirrors.

“Yehi toh khel hai. Yehi game hai,” he says. This is what sport is. This is the game.

Rohit Sharma should put those words on a T-shirt. Relaxed-fit, of course.