CUTTACK: While giving Virat Kohli‘s fitness status a go-ahead, India’s batting coach Sitanshu Kotak also brushed aside concerns about Rohit Sharma‘s lengthy lean patch. The captain has been short of runs for a while now.
“I personally don’t think there is any problem. I mean, in the last three Onedayers before this series (in the Nagpur ODI Rohit scored just 2 runs) Rohit has scored 56, 64 and 35.
Delhi Election Results 2025
So, he is averaging nearly 50-plus in those last three ODIs. We are talking about a player who has got 31 ODI hundreds. And when they keep scoring runs, nobody asks when they will fail,” Kotak told reporters here.
Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!
“When somebody gets out (early) or has a little bit of a lean patch, I don’t think I would be worried or thinking about their form. Yes, if you are talking about the Australia Tests, that was a tough time. But about the One-dayers, there’s not really much concern about that,” said Kotak. Rohit has scored 166 runs in his last 16 innings across formats at an average of 10.37, with only one 50-plus score to his name.
After a slow start to their chase in the first game in Nagpur, Shreyas Iyer and Shubman Gill gave India a solid platform before Axar Patel joined Gill to take India closer to the finish line. However, there was a mini-collapse as the hosts lost six wickets soon after, before reaching home with four wickets in hand.
Kotak, however, said he didn’t read much into that. “We lost two early wickets (too). But there a lot of positives, the way No. 3, 4 and 5 batted. There were two big partnerships. Gill, Shreyas and Axar batted really well. Somewhere down the line, you are going to lose some wickets. As a batting unit or as a team, there were a lot of positives. After losing two early wickets, we still didn’t let England come into the game,” he said.
