Rohit Sharma‘s Test career had two halves. The latter phase saw the 37-year-old earn recognition in the red-ball format, to the extent that he even saw himself compared to some of the greats India produced. But Rohit has former India head coach Ravi Shastri to largely credit for that phase, which came right after the 2019 World Cup, where the star batter’s record-breaking performance left the 62-year-old wondering.
Rohit largely gained success as a white-ball maverick through the better part of his career. However, he struggled to emulate the same in the longest format, where, unlike in ODIs and T20Is, he was a middle-order batter. However, an inkling from Shastri changed his Test career.
Speaking on the ICC Review, Shastri recalled his 2019 move, right after the end of the World Cup, where he decided that Rohit should open for India in Test cricket with the start of the inaugural edition of the World Test Championship.
“Batting at four, five, this guy used to get bored,” Shastri recalled. “Then I started dwelling on the fact, why is he so successful in one-day cricket? He likes to be out there early. I said, if he can go out there and do it, he has got enough time on his hands to play the quicks. He’s got the shots against the quicks, to take them on. The field is up, so Test cricket might be a honeymoon for him if he starts embracing it.”
Shastri recalled the idea popped into his mind after watching Rohit smash five centuries, en route to his tally of 648 runs in nine matches, after which he consulted with then-captain Virat Kohli ahead of the tour of West Indies and there was no looking back. Rohit scored nine of his 12 career tons as an opener.
“He’d batted enough at five and six and he wasn’t here and he wasn’t there,” Shastri said. “He would get his 20s or 30s and throw it away. (I thought) let’s put him under pressure and send him up (the order). And I remember telling him in the West Indies ‘we want you to open’.
“This was (August) 2019, if I’m not mistaken, after that World Cup. He’d had a great World Cup, so his form was very good. And he might have thought of it for a little while, but he was OK.
“Then he came in for the first Test match and he opened the innings and he got a hundred. If I’m not mistaken, he got a big 100 in that first innings and then he didn’t look back because then he seemed to enjoy it.
“He figured it out and what I must say he worked a lot on his technique because I thought his best batting was in England where you really got to play a little differently and especially he had to play with soft hands and could leave (the ball) a lot.
“And he worked on it, which was very good. So, suddenly from nowhere, he was setting up games for you.”
Rohit ended his career with 4301 runs in 67 appearances for India in Test cricket. 2697 of those runs came as an opener in 38 games at 42.08. In fact, he is the second-highest run-getter as an opener in WTC history.