Can Rohit Sharma, the opener, finally end the debate?

India’s victory over West Indies was comprehensive as it could get – the bowlers restricted the men from the Caribbean to 233 and then the batsmen ensured victory with 65 balls to spare. Ravindra Jadeja claimed five wickets, Shikhar Dhawan scored his second consecutive century, Dinesh Karthik weighed in with a half-century of his own. Once West Indies opener Johnson Charles was dismissed, with the exception of Darren Sammy, Dwayne’s Bravo’s team sunk without a trace. But still we are going to sit here and talk about Rohit Sharma. The Mumbai batsman who started his India career in the middle-order, is now the opener – and in his two outings in the Champions Trophy, he has scores of 65 and 52. [caption id=“attachment_866161” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Rohit Sharma has three fifties in his last four ODI innings as an opener. AFP[/caption] He has looked good against the new ball – played his shots, dealt with the short ball well, showed good judgement in leaving the ball outside the off-stump. He has run between the wickets well too. Together, with Dhawan, he has made the pain of losing Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir easier to deal with. A middle-order batsman going up the order – is nothing new for India. In a sense, he is following in the steps of Sachin Tendulkar (463 ODIs, 18426 runs, avg of 44.83), Sourav Ganguly (311 ODIs, 11363 runs, avg 41.02) and Sehwag (251 ODIs, 8273 runs, avg 35.05) himself. All three of them made the switch very successfully in ODIs (Sehwag even went on to do it Tests as well). But still we argue about Rohit Sharma… because we’ve always done that. We’ve argued about his talent; about his mental strength; about his shot selection; about his fitness issues. We argued whether he was best young batsman in India. We argued he was better than Virat Kohli. We argued if he was here to stay. After his two fifties in the first two matches of the Champions Trophy, we argued whether he could have made his starts count. Dhawan got his centuries – he finished the job off. But Rohit didn’t – he gave it away. So we’ll argue that he’s still got a way to go. He has always had skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s confidence. And yesterday after the match, Dhoni spoke about how they gave Rohit the opportunity of opening not just in India but also abroad. The Indian opener’s job is rather fickle. When teams come to India, we often see middle-order batsmen being pushed up the order. But as soon as we go abroad, those same openers develop feet of clay. So when Dhoni talks of wanting Rohit to open in both India and abroad, it means a lot. Given that Gambhir and Sehwag have faded away, it also means that Rohit has first shot at the slot. Rohit took up the chance but we could argue – and we did – that he didn’t have an option after Karthik’s centuries in the warm-up games sealed the middle order slot. It was either open the innings or sit on the bench and that’s not much of an option. But the question for Rohit is whether he should look at this as a part-time job (something that he should not be judged by) or a proper switch in the batting order. Opening the order means more responsibility and facing up to the new ball – all the time. It isn’t easy and experts will tell you it is a specialist position needing specialised skills, especially in England, Australia and South Africa (where India tour later in the year.) Then again, opening the batting means that in ODIs and T20s, you have time and enough balls to face when you come out to bat. It also means that you have time to build your innings and take advantage of the field restrictions. This could really be the opportunity that Rohit was waiting for. Most of us have heard the story about the coach being especially hard on a kid because he knows that the kid is capable of so much better. There is a spark there; a spark of genius that the coach sees. With Rohit, it’s almost as if everyone sees that spark. Now, it’s time for him to see it too. We’ve argued and we’ve argued about Rohit because somewhere a part of us, much like that coach, believes that he has the talent to end the argument and opening the innings give him the chance to do that rather emphatically.