Mumbai: India skipper Rohit Sharma acknowledged that he failed to match his batting standards in the ongoing Indian Premier League (IPL) season, but instead of overthinking about it, he endeavoured to stay in the right frame of mind and keep working on his flaws. The five-time IPL-winning skipper faced an exponential dip in form in the second half of the season as he struggled to cross even a score of the 20-run mark in the next six matches for Mumbai Indians. "As a batter, I know I didn't live up to the standard. But, after playing for all these years, I know that if I overthink, I won't play well," Rohit said on JioCinema Match Centre Live.
Rohit returned to form with a 38-ball 68 in their last match against Lucknow Super Giants but MI ended up on the losing side and finished the season at the bottom of the table. Rohit amassed 417 runs in 14 innings at an average of 32.08 and a strike-rate of 150, including a century and fifty. This is the eighth instance where Rohit has crossed the 400-run mark in an IPL season.
"All I try is to stay in a good mindset, in the right zone, keep practising and improve on all the flaws in my game. That's all I kept doing. Our season didn't go according to plan. We blame ourselves for this because we made, too, many mistakes during the season. We lost many games that we should have won, but that's the nature of the IPL. You get a few chances and when those chances come, you must grab them."
The Indian skipper said they were pretty clear about what their T20 World Cup squad would be like and they had 70 per cent of the players had clarity about their roles going into the IPL."We thought a lot about the team we ultimately selected for the World Cup. The spinners, seamers, batters and keepers, we knew before the IPL, who we would take to the World Cup. The IPL performances for everyone can be up and down, so we didn't focus, too, much on that. We needed to see the performances of certain players, but it was important for us to give everyone the clarity they needed," he added.
This will be the second World Cup for Rohit Sharma as a captain. Notably, he is one of the only two cricketers, who have been part of every T20I World Cup so far. He came as a replacement player in the 2007 World Cup and will be captaining the Indian side in the ninth edition.
"Everyone going into the IPL needed clarity of whether they would participate in the team and what their role would be so they could practice and play accordingly. All of these indicators we had shared with 70% of the team before the IPL," Rohit concluded.
India begins their T20 World Cup campaign against Ireland in New York on June 5. Team India will play their warm-up game against Bangladesh on June 1.
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