Nick Knight said that Joe Root dropping Rohit Sharma in the Rajkot Test changed the course of the series. After winning the opening Test by 28 runs in Hyderabad and taking a 1-0 series against India, England were brimming with confidence.
With India at 47 for 3 in the Rajkot Test, the visitors looked dominating. Tom Hartley created a chance to dismiss Rohit, who found an outside edge. However, Root couldn’t take the catch in the slip cordon and Rohit got a much-needed lifeline when he was batting on 27. | IND vs ENG, 5th Test scorecard
Rohit went on to score 131 runs off 196 balls and India eventually won the match by 434 runs to take a 2-1 lead in the series. Knight said that after the dropped chance, Rohit upped his game and made England work hard throughout the series.
Rohit was contributing but not big scores
“If the captain is feeling under a bit of pressure, he’s been targeted by the opposition, it makes everybody in the dressing room vulnerable. When you look at the two sides, you have Ben Stokes, whose performances individually haven’t been where he wanted them to be,” Knight told Jio Cinemas.
“About Rohit, I go back to one factor that might have determined the outcome of the series, and it’s Joe Root dropping Rohit in Rajkot. Rohit got an outside edge off Tom Hartley and Root put that down. At that point, he was contributing but not big scores. From that moment onwards, he has pushed on. When you look back at the bigger picture of the series, it was quite crucial,” he added.
After he scored a hundred in Rajkot, Rohit kicked on and has scored 400 runs from 5 matches at an average of 50 and a strike-rate of 58.8 with 2 hundreds and 2 fifties to his name.
In the 5th Test in Dharamsala, Rohit got to his 12th Test hundred before Ben Stokes rattled his woodwork with an absolute peach.
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