After Virat Kohli expressed his desire to open in T20 Internationals, Rohit Sharma clarified that the batting combination for the T20 World Cup is yet to be finalized.
After a hard fought T20I series against England, it was Team India that came out on top and lifted the Paytm T20I trophy. It was a nail-biter of a series that went back and forth and had some terrific performances from some of the game’s biggest names.
What was interesting to note was the fact that India tried out five different playing eleven combinations during the course of the series. Debutants Ishan Kishan and Suryakumar Yadav announced their arrival in terrific fashion with some very well played innings whereas veteran players like KL Rahul and Shikhar Dhawan did not produce much with the bat.
With the series tied at 2-2, India made a change at the top in their batting lineup. Skipper Virat Kohli decided to open the batting alongside Rohit Sharma, a role that he is quite familiar with, having done so successfully with the Royal Challengers Bangalore in the IPL. The move proved to be the deciding factor in the game as the two greats of Indian cricket really went after the English bowlers and put on an opening stand of 94 runs.
After Sharma was bowled by Ben Stokes for a brilliant 64 of 34 balls, in came Suryakumar Yadav at number three and started timing the ball beautifully right from the get-go. Kohli and Yadav too put on a sizeable partnership before the latter was dismissed for a quickfire 32 of 17 deliveries. If that was not enough for the English bowlers, in stepped Hardik Pandya at number four which was a surprise as one would expect Rishabh Pant to come in at this stage of the game. India eventually went onto put up a mammoth total of 224 on the board.
While the move of promoting Kohli up the order, having Suryakumar Yadav at number three followed by the middle order comprising Pant, Iyer and Pandya seems to be India’s best batting lineup at the moment, vice-captain Rohit Sharma was quick to point out that the batting order of the team was far from being finalized considering the T20 World Cup gets underway only in October.
It’s still a long time for the World Cup, so (it’s) early days to talk about what the batting lineup would be looking like. We just have to analyse and think about what suits the team the most. Today was a tactical move because we wanted an extra bowler to play. We had to leave one batsman out, unfortunately, it was KL, which was very tough.
We need to see the form of the current players, what is the ideal eleven on certain conditions and certain oppositions that we play. Sometimes you might feel that you need to have six bowlers in your playing eleven, which means you might have to sacrifice a batsman. All those things will come into play as we get closer to the World Cup,
added Rohit.
