Former India skipper Rohit Sharma recently opened out on the shift in his mindset after the 2019 ODI World Cup after the team had fallen short of winning the trophy. Despite Rohit smacking 648 runs in the tournament, including 6 centuries, India fell to New Zealand by 18 runs in the semifinal. Reflecting on the loss, Rohit said that got him thinking about what use those runs were if they couldn’t help his country win the trophy. “The 2019 World Cup was a big lesson for me. I scored so many runs there, but we did not win the World Cup. So I asked myself, what is the use of this? What will I do with these runs? Yes, they remain in your statistics column and all that, but for me, that was of no real use. That is when I decided that I would play for what makes me happy,” he said on JioHotstar’s ‘Captain Rohit Sharma’s Roadmap for T20 World Cup’ show. “That is why I started thinking differently in 2020. What I eventually implemented in 2022 and 2023 took me two years to adapt to, from 2020 to 2022. I realised that I had to play with intent and without any fear. Otherwise, it does not matter how many times I got out in the 40s or in the 90s; it never bothered me at all,” he added. Also Read | Rohit Sharma opens up about taking tough calls as skipper, cites example of how he and Rahul Dravid told Shreyas Iyer about exclusion from 2022 Asia Cup, T20 WC The 38-year-old also said that when he was captain, he had to take out the stats-obsessed mindset from players in the team. “India is a very stats-obsessed country. We love talking about stats. Even among players, it is often about, ‘I scored so many runs, I did this, I did that.’ I had to take all of that out. Because at the end of the day, if you do not have a World Cup, all those stats do not matter. What will you do after 20 or 25 years with those runs and everything else? In my view, and this is my personal thinking, what really matters is having successful campaigns and winning trophies. That defines your career, that is when you can say that you have been successful in your cricketing career. This is my belief, this is what I think,” he said.
‘What will I do with these runs?’: Rohit Sharma on turning point after India failed to win 2019 ODI World Cup
