India vs New Zealand 2019: Battle of the Heavyweights

#3 Rohit Sharma vs Martin Guptill – The Hitman Vs The Hitter

Rohit Sharma - The smiling hitman

Rohit Sharma has achieved the rare feat of scoring 1000 runs in ODIs during 2018. He is currently ranked at No 2 in ICC ODI rankings.

Rohit started the new year in grand style scoring a hundred in the first match of the year. Rohit is known for his big hundreds and out of his 22 hundred, on 14 occasions he has scored more than 125 runs including 3 double hundreds.

The beauty about Rohit Sharma is that once he survives the initial 30 balls of his innings, he would stay foot to score big. He has the game to change gears suddenly and make good the time lost. In the present Indian team, no one could match Rohit Sharma’s six-hitting abilities and he is renowned for his trademark mammoth sixes.

In every series, there will be a couple of matches where he will take his team home single-handedly. India’s fortune in the series against New Zealand would revolve around the top-order batting more particularly of Rohit Sharma.

Martin Guptill - The impact player at the top

Martin Guptill is made of the same cast like Rohit Sharma. He is an aggressive opener who could make use of the powerplay to his advantage. He believes in providing flying starts to his team and is equally adept to both pace and spin. Guptill has an ODI double century to his credit.

In 2018, Guptill was out of action for 10 months and on his comeback match against Sri Lanka, he scored a hundred. Guptill has been a consistent performer against India in the past and the fact that he is playing on his home turf would make him deadly dangerous.