Rohit Sharma Test retirement marks the end of an era, but his ODI World Cup dream is far from over. A look at his Test legacy and what’s next for the Indian captain.
With barely more than a month remaining to the tour of England, Rohit Sharma declared his retirement from Test cricket.
Rohit Sharma Test retirement: End of an Era in Indian Cricket
So the first Test of India on June 20 at Leeds shall have to be presided over by some other captain. With 12 victories in 24 matches, Rohit is the 10th-most successful India Test captain.
This still counts as most wins by any captain who led India in fewer than 40 Tests, presenting a 60% win ratio, equalling that of MS Dhoni. Rohit, since assuming the mantle of being the all-format captain of India, has led the nation to two massive series wins-organizing a highly popular Indian spirit against Australia 2023 and against England 2024.
The rest of the year, however, did not go as well as the captain might have envisaged, as in October, New Zealand managed to whitewash India 3-0 to break the latter’s 12-year-long home dominance.
The Tryst with Test cricket seems all but lost for Rohit, at least for now. It’s clear the Indian captain has been battling with form. Having bid adieu to T20Is last June, he decided to take a bow from Tests following a disappointing series against Australia where he simply could not get going. 3, 6, 10 and 3 were the scores, and Rohit looked utterly disoriented, either batting in the middle order or opening.
The travails were such that he had to take the rare step of dropping himself from the fifth Test in Sydney, with Jasprit Bumrah taking over the responsibility. Nonetheless, India lost the series 1-3 and had to relinquish the Border-Gavaskar Trophy for the first time in 8 years.
The retirement from Test cricket has now enabled Rohit to dedicate all his energies into the One-Day Internationals. Rohit must have just one goal in mind after captaining India to the final of the ODI World Cup in 2023, winning the T20 World Cup in the same year, and seeing a successful Champions Trophy campaign.
That Rohit will be playing international cricket in only one format will also increase his chances of playing the 2027 ODI World Cup in South Africa, and putting the award for another 50-over showpiece extravaganza past 40 cannot be ruled out.
Rohit retires with 4301 runs at 40.57 from 67 Tests with 12 centuries. In case somebody thinks they are not the greatest statistics, think about how much Rohit has been a match-winner and a player for India in ODIs and T20Is. Truly, the real renaissance of Rohit in Tests started in 2019 in his role as an opener.
Similar to how it was with the 2013 Champions Trophy and the home Test series against South Africa, Rohit’s return to the Test arena got off to a flying start, ending with 529 runs in 3 matches at an outrageous average of 132.25. He hit twin centuries in his very first match as the Test opener – 176 and 127, and then followed it up with his first double century by scoring 212 runs in Ranchi.
Rohit Sharma’s Test career having two halves
Rohit never really looked back. Over the next five years, Rohit went on to hit five more hundreds, including his first hundred abroad. His 127 at The Oval was in fact a big knock with an 83 at Lord’s. That helped India to hang on and draw the 2021 series in England 2-2.
Intermittently, Rohit continued playing big innings, scoring 161 runs at Chennai against England in 2021 and 120 at Nagpur against Australia on rank turners, going from strength to strength. In the maiden WTC cycle, Rohit scored 1,094 runs from 19 innings at an average of 60.77 and the subsequent 19 innings at an average of 42.11 for 758. However, the current one has been a struggle for Rohit, with 855 runs from as many as 30 innings.
Even this year, in India’s 3-1 series win against England at home, the captain set the standard for the rest of the team with 400 runs, including two centuries. Rohit, in fact, is still the most successful opener in WTC with over 2600 runs, but the latter half of this year has hit him like a gut punch.
Rohit, opening, did well compared to Rohit, who so far has not been successful in the middle order. Making a record of his own, he hit a hundred on debut in 2013 – which also happened to be the farewell Test series of Sachin Tendulkar – where he scored the second-highest score of the season (177), just behind Shikhar Dhawan’s 187, while the other was a century in his next match itself. His next Test century came after an interval of four years.
Just a handful of opportunities afforded Rohit to bat during the 2014 tour to Australia and then in South Africa and England in 2018. In those 27 Tests from November 2013 to October 2019, however, with the considered limited opportunities that he had to bat in the middle order, he scored 1585 runs at an average of 39.60-an entirely stark difference from 2685 runs from 37 Tests at an average of 44.01 that he had made as an opener.
