New Delhi, May 18 (IANS) Former India head coach Ravi Shastri revealed an important decision during his coaching tenure that shaped the Test career of Rohit Sharma.

Rohit, who retired from Test cricket earlier this month, initially joined the Test team as a middle-order batter, but it was a suggestion from Shastri that led to his move to the top of the order—an adjustment that transformed him into a world-class opener, allowing him to make a bigger impact early in the innings.

In the early stages of his career, Rohit was primarily recognised as a white-ball specialist. However, Ravi Shastri’s decision to promote the hard-hitting batter to the top of the order in 2019 proved to be a turning point, as Rohit quickly flourished and revitalised his career in the longest format of the game.

“Batting at four, five, this guy used to get bored. Then I started dwelling on the fact that he is so successful in one-day cricket? He likes to be out there early. I said, if he can go out there and do it, he has got enough time on his hands to play the quicks. He’s got the shots against the quicks, to take them on. The field is up, so Test cricket might be a honeymoon for him if he starts embracing it,” Shastri said on the most recent episode of The ICC Review.

Shastri revealed that the idea of Rohit opening in Tests first came to him during the 2019 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup, where he was in sublime form, scoring five centuries and finishing as the tournament’s top run-getter with 648 runs at an average of 81.

Impressed by his dominant performances, Shastri proposed the idea to then-captain Virat Kohli. The move proved to be a masterstroke, as Rohit responded with twin centuries in his debut Test as an opener against South Africa and went on to score nine of his 12 Test centuries from that point onward.

Rohit ultimately finished his Test career with 4301 runs in 67 games at an average of 40.57, including 18 half-centuries.

“He’d batted enough at five and six and he wasn’t here and he wasn’t there. He would get his 20s or 30s and throw it away. (I thought) let’s put him under pressure and send him up (the order). And I remember telling him in the West Indies ‘We want you to open’.

“This was (August) 2019, if I’m not mistaken, after that World Cup. He’d had a great World Cup, so his form was very good. And he might have thought of it for a little while, but he was OK,” Shastri said

“Then he came in for the first Test match and he opened the innings and he got a hundred. If I’m not mistaken, he got a big 100 in that first innings and then he didn’t look back because then he seemed to enjoy it.

“He figured it out and what I must say he worked a lot on his technique because I thought his best batting was in England where you really got to play a little differently and especially he had to play with soft hands and could leave (the ball) a lot. And he worked on it, which was very good. So, suddenly from nowhere, he was setting up games for you,” he concluded.

–IANS

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