Rohit Sharma – Is talent wasted on him?

He has ample time when facing the ball, but time is fast running out on him.

Back in 2007, when Rohit Sharma first made a name for himself, Sachin was half a decade away from dropping a bombshell on his devotees, Ishant Sharma still had a zing about his bowling, Irfan could still swing it at will and Virat Kohli was the boy next door with grand temperament problems. A classy 30 in the T20 final and an even classier 66 in the CB Series final marked him as the next big thing in Indian cricket. Half a decade hence, people still have to talk about that 66, indicating how inconsistent he has been. A true measure of Rohit Sharma’s inconsistency would be the dazzling heights that Kohli has conquered meanwhile – an ICC award en route becoming the second youngest to 4000 runs after Sachin and achieving the vice-captaincy of a team brimming with superstars.

Commentary these days is quite clichéd and aims to appease the pop-cultured fans that love T20. But it isn’t without its benefits; a good example being the lovely remarks on air by Harsha Bhogle and Sunil Gavaskar. Harsha rightly mentions that if you have made it so far to the national side, surely you must have ability. What differentiates a seasoned cricketer from the wannabes then, is temperament. Gavaskar mentions that Sharma has a lazy elegance about his shots, which makes him seem careless when he gets out, incurring the wrath of fans more often than not. Another man that comes to mind when you talk about lazy elegance is Vintage.Velvety.Sublime.Laxman. Laxman too, took a while to come into his own and even when he did, chose to score only against the toughest of oppositions, throwing away wonderful starts with reckless shots. Laxman mentions in an interview that one of his greatest regrets is not getting more 100s than he did at the Test level.

Rohit Sharma is still being treated as a youngster by the team management. That is bizarre, considering he has played 86 ODIs. To put that number into perspective, we need to look no further than Paul Collingwood, a bright-natured commentator and England’s only captain to deliver a World Cup. Paul, a short format specialist, played all of 197 ODIs. What makes Sharma’s case even more bizarre is that he has been allowed to fail far more than perpetual bench-warmers, Ajinkya Rahane and Manoj Tiwary. Dhoni has vociferously backed him and banked on him innumerable times, the fourth ODI between England and India at Mohali, being the greatest example. Rahane had to get his stumps cartwheeling only a couple of times, before the baton could be passed on to Rohit again. And anyone who watched his innings in the 4^th ODI will know everything that is needed to sum up an already sizeable ODI career of 5 years. In spite of owning every shot in the book, Rohit Sharma averaged a meagre 30 in ODIs with 14 50+ scores in 81 innings before this match. It means he makes a marked contribution only once in almost every 6 innings he bats, which isn’t good enough at this level.

Any novice to cricket would ask you what the fuss is all about when it comes to Rohit’s talent and why he gets more chances than any other player. We saw it in the way he opened his account, a front foot pull in front of square. To do that against any non-Indian new ball bowler needs some serious skill. What is that skill, you may ask. It is time, that one extra second, which makes a difference between a champion batsman and an average player. That one second gives the batsman enough time to adjust his footwork, choose the area on the ground to hit the ball to and if possible, change a premeditated shot as well. Rohit, like Kohli, is one of those players who can hit the same ball through offside and onside without showing the difficulty behind the execution. In his innings of 83, that ended prematurely, I might add, he played some wonderful dabs to third man, neatly timed paddle sweeps, elegantly wristy flicks off the pads and some slaps through the point. The icing on the cake was the lofted drive off Treadwell that left the ball sailing over the long-on ropes. That shot showed how all he needs, is to let his bat kiss the ball to deliver all the timing that is needed for it to zoom away.

In a one-off phase in his career where he was reasonably consistent, Rohit showed the same class against West Indies, winning a Man of the Series award too. Back then, he still had a bat sponsor, not surprisingly, MRF. When Sachin himself felt that Rohit Sharma and Kohli were the two batsmen he felt were capable of coming close to his batting exploits, MRF couldn’t be blamed for a similar prediction. Another innings that stands out in my memory was his gem against a fiery Australian bowling line-up in the T20 World Cup in West Indies in 2010. Rohit Sharma is someone who is yet to deliver on a grand promise, made by glimpses of genius that flash every now and then when he is on song. He is a strange case in Indian cricket. He has tons of runs in the domestic circuit, so it isn’t true that he doesn’t deserve his spot. Secondly, of all those who have scored tons of runs in domestic games, he is the one batsman who doesn’t have a problem with bounce or serious pace. If I were to pick a cricketer on talent alone to play South Africa in South Africa or Australia in Australia, Sharma would definitely be there in the list along with Kohli and Pujara.

In a world where someone like Dhoni is flayed for one reason or the other, it isn’t strange that Rohit Sharma is given a hard time by the press and his detractors. However, the innings of 83, his first score of substance since the half century against Pakistan in Asia Cup, showed he can put his head down and hold his fort. It showed that he gets edgy and tries to throw his wicket from time to time. The dismissal showed he gets unlucky once in a while too, like his freak injury in a football session, couple of hours before his test debut. Most importantly, it showed, he can handle pace and movement and can step up the gas at any juncture when needed. The 2015 World Cup is only 2 years away. The South Africa tour isn’t looming too far. There is a reckless young cricketer, who is trying his everything to throw it all away; oodles of elegance and time that was gifted to him on a platter, a platter never available to demigods like Dravid, who had sculpted their mark entirely on discipline.

But at the end of the day, Rohit can bowl a bit (he has an IPL hattrick), he can field and can certainly orchestrate a lazy dalliance between bat and ball on a cricket pitch. And connoisseurs of the game, weak enough in financial statistics to look beyond investments and dividends and poor enough at pragmatic decisions, will hope he survives himself, his one true enemy on a cricket ground. For what is ability, without the will to make it serve your purpose?