Rohit Sharma - Not as talented as we think, not as bad as we make him out to be

Rohit Sharma is being unfairly criticised

Cruel. That’s what cricket at the international level is. The players who have had a taste of it know how fickle its followers can be. When you win, when you perform well, you’re worshipped, you’re treated like a war hero. When you don’t, you’re made fun of, you’re abused by people who feel it’s their birthright to do so.

No matter how much cricketers deny this fact, in mundane press conferences and interviews, it affects them, this enormous love and hate that they get. They say that performing on the field is all they care about, that criticism and hate don’t matter one bit. They are lying.

The voice saying all of this is one of a professional trained to handle the media, told to be emotionless. It’s not the voice of the man underneath the player, the man who has emotions, the man who feels the hate, the man who yearns for love.

When Rohit Sharma told the press at the end of the penultimate day of the third Test against Sri Lanka that all the criticism he gets, all the hate he gets, doesn’t bother him, seems irrelevant to him, he was talking as the professional trained to handle the media and not as Rohit Sharma.

He is human. It does affect him.

The world’s most hated cricketer

It hurts him when people assume he doesn’t work hard just because he is extraordinarily talented. It hurts him when he is made the butt of all jokes even when others in the team fail to deliver the goods. It hurts him when others are praised when they play well, while he is not.

People say he’s done well because he gets so many chances. People say that he should be doing much more than what he is doing with the amount of talent he has. It hurts him when people spew hatred on him because captain Virat Kohli prefers him over Cheteshwar Pujara.

All of it hurts because underneath that international cricketer is the man who yearns to be loved. And that’s the one thing he has never got – love.

Rohit is probably the most hated player in world cricket right now. Anything he does, people find in it a reason to criticize him, to make fun of him, to abuse him.

The amount of hate Rohit gets is quite shocking, the reasons even more so. He gets hate when he doesn’t score runs. They say he is not contributing to the team. He gets hate when he scores runs. They say he is blocking another player’s entry into the team. He gets hate when the captain plays him at number three, ahead of Pujara.

He gets hate when the captain moves him down to number five. He gets hate when he struggles in the middle order in ODIs. He gets hate even when he scores double centuries as an opener in ODIs. He just gets hate for everything he ever does in life. And he’ll continue to get it until we change our perception of what we call ‘talent’.

All of this just because there is a belief in people’s minds that he is one of the most gifted batsmen the game has ever seen, that he is way more talented than his counterparts. The word ‘talent’ has almost become synonymous with his name.

This is where people go wrong – when they feel that he is better than the rest just because he plays seemingly effortless shots, bats with a sense of lazy elegance that is easy on the eye. They tend to forget that the others are no less, that it requires a lot of talent to play for your country.

Talent, when it comes to batting, is not just the ability to play beautiful shots; it’s a lot more.

It’s the ability to stay at the crease without losing your concentration for long periods of time, the way Pujara can; it’s the ability to deliver in big matches, the kind Shikhar Dhawan has; it’s the ability to score runs through sheer will and determination, the kind Murali Vijay has. All that is talent as well, but nobody ever brings up the word as often when these players fail. This special treatment is reserved for Rohit.

Rohit’s crucial knock in the third Test against Sri Lanka

Rohit Sharma played a crucial knock against Sri Lanka in the second innings of the 3rd Test

31 August 2015, India are three wickets down for seven runs against Sri Lanka in the third Test, almost on the verge of nullifying the massive advantage – a 111-run lead provides on a bowler friendly wicket.

In walks Rohit Sharma, a slow, lazy kind of walk. His harshest critics say he walks that way because he is not interested in batting.

He marks his guard in an unenthusiastic manner. He doesn’t bother to survey the field for long. It seems as if he has just been woken up from his sleep. But once he starts batting, he seems to be in good touch.

He goes on to play an innings which saves India the blushes, which prevents an all-too-familiar batting collapse at an important juncture in the match. And he does it in his own way. Lazy elegance, supreme timing, almost sorry to hit the ball. Rohit spends 131 minutes at the crease, spread over two days.

For 130 of them, he is in complete control. He handled Dhammika Prasad and Nuwan Pradeep when the new ball was doing weird things. He prevented Rangana Herath and Tharindu Kaushal from ensuring a repeat of Galle. He hits his trademark shots – a lofted six off Herath in the dying stages of Day 3, and a beautiful cover drive off Nuwan Pradeep the next morning stand out.

The only time he doesn't appear lazy was when he reached his half-century. He screams in delight. You can see it means a lot to him. He hasn’t put a foot wrong until now.

But in the 131st minute, he does. He pulls a ball that was meant to be pulled, but top edges it into the hands of the fielder at fine leg.

He has fallen at the stroke of lunch, having stretched India’s lead to 230. He looks morose, his face pale. He knows what’s coming. Criticism, accusations of batting for milestones, jokes for getting out just before breaks. Hate, hate, hate. Not the love he yearns for.

People conveniently choose to forget the value of his innings; all they talk about is his dismissal. Irresponsible shot, careless cricket, the 50s are not enough, he is wasting his talent. All these phrases are being thrown around in the commentary box. They say it once, twice, and will continue saying it until the next time he gets out.

That is the thing with Rohit Sharma. He is judged to a different standard than the rest. Virat Kohli’s fighting innings of 21 is praised by the commentators, but they never say Kohli threw it away. Rohit’s innings is not even mentioned properly. They are only focussed on his dismissal – he threw it away, that’s what they keep repeating.

Is Rohit's talent his biggest curse?

The hype about Rohit being unnaturally gifted is probably the reason for all of this. What people don’t recognize is that being gifted is not limited to batting with elegance and style. A gifted batsman has many other traits as well – powers of concentration, grit, determination, steel, strong will power.

People say that these things can be developed, but the elegance, the sense of timing can’t. They feel it’s all natural.

Well, it’s not. It takes a lot of hard work. It can be developed, and Rohit has done it. All those who feel he’s just wasting something he was born with are wrong; all those who never give him credit when he does well, those who say it’s just because he’s talented, he’s gifted are spitting on the years of hard work it took for him to make his batting appear effortless, make it appear beautiful, make it appear ‘gifted’.

Contrary to what many people think, Rohit actually works hard on his game. It’s not by the click of a button that he has transformed from an average middle order batsman into one of the world’s best ODI openers. It’s not by the click of a button that he scored two ODI double centuries. It’s not by the click of a button that his average which was below 30 two years back is now touching 40.

What he has done in ODIs, he is doing in Tests as well. He’s showing some signs of improvement as a Test batsman. He has shown the willingness to curb his shot making tendencies, the willingness to hang around, the willingness to graft for his runs.

In these last two matches, he has batted better than ever before in Test cricket. It’s something which needs to be appreciated, but it’s not.

Rohit can never do enough to win people over. The expectations they have formed of him, based on their perception of what talent means, are never going to be fulfilled. His talent has been overhyped, plain and simple.

People will talk about how many chances he has got in the playing XI, they will say it’s completely fair to criticize him for his failures. Yes, it is. But then we don’t judge him as we would judge somebody similar, like Shikhar Dhawan, do we?

Criticism is completely fair, but when all the players are judged on similar parameters. With Rohit Sharma, that never happens. He is just expected to do something phenomenal every time he comes out to bat. It’s unfair. It’s incorrect.

Many people believe that Rohit doesn’t have the will-power, the steel to fight through situations. While that may be true for Rohit Sharma the batsman, that’s certainly not true for Rohit Sharma the man. The fact that he carries on despite this extraordinary amount of hate that he gets is commendable.

We, the members of the Rohit Sharma hate club, carry on spewing hatred when we can’t even take small amounts of it ourselves. But he’s taking all of it and carrying on. That really counts for a lot.

We are sitting at home and criticizing a man who is fighting it out there, who is trying to improve at his job, who is trying to fulfill the unrealistic expectations we have set for him. We seem to have forgotten that underneath the cricketer, there is a man who wants to be loved.

Considering how we treat him, even a little bit would be enough.