- Thursday, January 30, 2025
Gavaskar has been critical about the repeated failures of Indian batters, and Rohit Sharma in particular, in the recently concluded Australia Test tour
By: India Weekly
INDIA captain Rohit Sharma, who is going through a lean patch, is reportedly angry with the relentless attacks by legendary batsman Sunil Gavaskar and filed a complaint with the BCCI, CricBlogger reports.
During the recently concluded Test match tour of Australia, Rohit managed to score just 31 runs from three Tests, at an average of 6.20.
He recently played in Mumbai’s Ranji Trophy match against Jammu and Kashmir in Mumbai, but scored a paltry 3 and 28.
Gavaskar has been critical about the repeated failures of Indian batters, who failed to cross the 200 mark six out of nine times during the Australia series.
“It is clear that in the last six months, the batting failed and that was the main reason that we lost matches that we should have won,” the former captain stated.
When asked about the raging debate surrounding the future of struggling stars Rohit and Virat Kohli, Gavaskar said, “How long they continue is really up to the selectors.”
The 75-year-old former India captain was unhappy with Rohit’s absence from the first test at Perth and wanted the selection committee to appoint Jasprit Bumrah the captain for the entire Australia series, with Rohit Sharma participating as player.
In a column for the Sydney Morning Herald, Gavaskar said that Rohit would relinquish captaincy if he failed to score runs in the Melbourne and Sydney Tests.
Interestingly in the last Test at Sydney, Rohit had “opted to rest”, while Bumrah was back as captain. Many cricket pundits even speculated that Rohit’s last test got over at Melbourne. However, he later quashed those rumours.
After Rohit’s Ranji disaster, where an unfancied Jammu and Kashmir defeated star-studded defending champions Mumbai by five wickets, Gavaskar had observed that “all-out aggressive mode of batting” can only work in flat pitches.
“But on pitches where the ball is doing something, there has to be a technique good enough to keep out the good delivery,” he wrote in Sportstar.
He also wondered whether Rohit and other Test batsman Yashasvi Jaiswal played the Ranji match just to avoid getting stripped of their BCCI contracts.
These remarks had upset Rohit Sharma and he decided to file a complaint.
