Leaders of cricket teams are not miracle-workers, and poor results in 2022 had more to do with out-of-form personnel around him than Rohit Sharma misplacing his captaincy mojo.
Rohit Sharma turns 36 midway through the Indian Premier League (IPL) season. Given the advances in sports medicine and the ever-more sophisticated methods of recovery available to professional athletes, that’s no longer considered old. Tom Brady, the legendary American Football quarterback, was 43 when he won the last of his seven Super Bowls – no franchise in the sport has won as many. MS Dhoni, one of Rohit’s predecessors as India captain, is gearing up for a 16th IPL season while a few months short of turning 42. Jimmy Anderson, still outfoxing batsmen for fun with the red ball, will be 41 during the Ashes later this year.
Leadership, though, takes a toll. Dhoni may still be leading Chennai Super Kings, after the Ravindra Jadeja captaincy experiment came a cropper in 2022, but he had given up the India captaincy in both ODIs and T20Is soon after turning 35. He left the Test arena altogether even earlier. Sourav Ganguly quit the game at 36, three years on from losing the captaincy in controversial circumstances. Rahul Dravid, who made his Test debut alongside Ganguly at Lord’s in 1996, had also walked away from leading India when he was 35.
The IPL, and the need to return to business as usual after Mumbai’s worst-ever season in 2022, isn’t the only thing that Rohit has to focus on in the months ahead. The Mumbai Indians kit would barely have been stowed away at the end of the IPL when he takes India’s red-ball team to London, and the World Test Championship final against Australia at The Oval. Having been part of the side that lost to New Zealand in the 2021 final, Rohit’s task is to bring an ICC trophy back to India for the first time in a decade.
It doesn’t end there. Less than four months after that final, the 50-over World Cup begins in India. The format may now be the least favoured among fans, but this is the trophy that is most central to modern Indian cricket history. When Indians think of cricket and leadership, those thoughts are dominated by Kapil Dev’s heroics in 1983, and Dhoni’s emphatic six to seal victory 28 years later. Regardless of the 50-over game’s middle-child status, the World Cup matters to India. And it certainly means a whole lot to players of Rohit’s generation.
You will already have seen the many headlines and the articles below them. That this is Rohit’s moment of truth, that 2023 will be the true test of his captaincy credentials. That narrative is hyperbolic nonsense. Captains are not wizards or miracle-workers. They are constrained by vagaries of form, and by the personnel around them.
Was Dhoni really a worse captain after the 2011 World Cup win? Or were the 4-0 Test thrashings in England and Australia because a once-great team was on the wrong side of the hill and in free fall? From early 2012 to early 2014, Dhoni didn’t just have to manage a side in transition. He waved goodbye to more than half a dozen teammates who had once played at an elite level. Despite that, in 2013, he led from the front as Australia were drubbed 4-0 in a Test series, and the Champions Trophy was won without losing a game.
Mumbai didn’t finish with a dismal 4-10 record in 2022 because Rohit misplaced the captaincy skills that had previously won the IPL five times. They flopped because the players just weren’t good enough. Only one batsman, Ishan Kishan, topped 400 runs, and his strike-rate (120.11) was more suitable for 2012 than 2022.
Jasprit Bumrah took 5 for 10 in one outing, but just 10 wickets across the other 13 games. Daniel Sams was the only other bowler to take more than 10 wickets, and he went at 8.80 an over. The once-Herculean figure of Kieron Pollard managed 144 runs from 134 balls for the season, while Hardik Pandya, whose all-round skills had given the side enviable balance, had decamped to the Gujarat Titans and a title-winning campaign as their captain.
You could have had Ian Chappell or Mark Taylor or Michael Vaughan in charge of that Mumbai team, and they still wouldn’t have won a thing. A captain is like the conductor of an orchestra. If almost every instrument is woefully out of tune, good luck getting a symphony out of it.
The same applies to Rohit as India captain. He has a 4-1 win-loss record in Tests, and is 19-7 when leading the ODI side. In the T20I arena, the win percentage is even more impressive, with 39 wins and only 12 defeats. So, did India lose the World T20 semifinal to England because of Rohit’s captaincy missteps? Or was it because India were playing cricket from the 2010s, while England had embraced a far more aggressive approach?
The unpalatable truth was that in those conditions, India didn’t have anything like the big-hitting firepower that England did. Nor did they have the skilful wrist-spinner who could have preyed on a traditional English frailty. It wasn’t a poor bowling attack, but it lacked any sort of X-factor or oomph.
Things aren’t likely to be very different in the 50-over version later in the year. Kuldeep Yadav has moved ahead of Yuzvendra Chahal as the team’s frontline wrist-spinner, but he averages 23.53 in away games, and nearly 30 at home. With Bumrah’s fitness travails no closer to resolution, and Umran Malik not trusted to play even a game against Australia, which Indian bowler looks like he could run through a side?
It’s no exaggeration to say that being captain of the Indian cricket team is one of the most high-pressure jobs in any walk of life, anywhere in the world. The scrutiny is endless, the armchair experts number in the millions, and the media outrage when the team loses can be toxic. Compared to that, the IPL may almost be a welcome distraction.
In spite of the poor campaign last season, Rohit’s win percentage as the Mumbai Indians captain (57.43) is almost as good as Dhoni’s with Chennai (60.77). And only Dhoni (132 wins) had led a team to more victories in the league than Rohit (83). Crucially, five of those 83 successes have come in the matches that matter most.
With the searing pace of the fit-again Jofra Archer to call on, and the once-in-a-generation all-round skill of Cameron Green also part of the squad, Mumbai are unlikely to be anywhere near as mediocre as they were in 2022. If they do get back to doing what they do best, challenging for the title, that won’t just be testament to Rohit’s leadership. It will also mean that those around him are performing again.