Rohit Sharma has seen Steve Smith’s stellar recent success and he wants a piece of it

2 minute read

“I hear you’re a middle order batter now, Rohit. How did you get interested in that type of thing?”

Before this Australia-India series, we reported how failing failure Steve Smith was going to hide down the order following his abject failure as a Test opener.

The move has gone really, really well for him with a rate of improvement from one innings to the next that has been almost unquantifiably massive. After batting for one minute and one ball for zero runs in his first innings at four, he dropped to five for his next knock, where he batted for an hour and a half and made 17 runs.

Those spectacular returns haven’t escaped the eagle eye of Rohit Sharma, who has been opening with an almost Smithian level of ineffectiveness these last few months. After 133 runs in his last 10 innings, he says he will bat, “somewhere in the middle,” on his return to the India side in Adelaide.

It’s tempting to think Rohit might mean ‘middle’ in a more geographic sense here (i.e. near the stumps), but the comment was made while simultaneously confirming that KL Rahul will open. (Unless he’s saying that KL will be working at some sort of retail establishment that will be open specifically during the hours of play while Rohit’s otherwise engaged ‘somewhere in the middle’? Seems unlikely, but we can’t rule it out.)

Rohit is not bad in the middle order. He has hit three of his Test hundreds and six of his fifties from number six, where he averages 54.57. Of course he was six years younger back when all of that happened.

A mere six years doesn’t necessarily take much of a toll once you’re boisterously tramping your way through middle age – but that’s assuming you’re looking after yourself. A serious fried egg habit might accelerate the ageing process.