Rohit Sharma announced his retirement from Test cricket on Wednesday, June 7. He announced his retirement all of a sudden, with Team India set to play a Test series against England.
Rohit, while previously speaking to Michael Clarke on his podcast, seemed very confident of doing well as a team against England in England. However, with just two weeks to go before the Indian Test squad is announced, he announced his retirement from Test cricket.
Rohit Sharma retired from Test cricket as the 16th highest run-getter in the format with 4,301 runs with an average of 40.57, including 12 centuries and 18 half-centuries. As a captain, he maintained a 50 percent win record, winning 12 out of the 24 Test matches he led the team.
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Chopra On Kohli, Shastri's Role In Shaping Up Rohit's Test Career
Now, former Indian opener Aakash Chopra has looked back at his Test career. He looked back at the initial days of his Test career when he batted in the middle-order.
"He started his career with a century. It was a match against the West Indies at the Eden Gardens. Then we went to the Wankhede Stadium and he scored a hundred there as well. The start of his career was like a rocket being launched. When you start like that, you expect everything to go fine. However, it didn't unfold like that at all," Chopra said.
He then highlighted the role of Virat Kohli and Ravi Shastri in helping his transform his Test career. Since he started opening in Test cricket in 2019, Rohit scored 2697 runs in 66 innings at an average of 42.81 and a strike rate of 42.81. She scored nine hundreds and eight fifties in the meantime.
"He was in and out, sometimes due to fitness and questions on his form on other occasions. It seemed at one stage that Rohit was very talented and was a white-ball superstar, but he was unable to understand the template of Tests. It came down to now or never. Virat Kohli and Ravi Shastri did what MS Dhoni and Duncan Fletcher had thought in 2013," he added.
"They said they would give him one final chance and see where he goes. I remember him scoring a century while playing with Mayank Agarwal in that match, and then he kept scoring hundreds. When he started opening in Tests, a chapter was started that wrote a new legacy for Rohit Sharma," Chopra added further.
Shubman Gill has emerged as the top contender to replace Rohit Sharma as the next Test skipper for India ahead of the England Test series.
