It’s been 4 months since the Mumbai Indians made the official announcement of replacing their formal captain Rohit Sharma with their newly appointed captain Hardik Pandya, and the auction took place about a week later. Now, as we are almost done with the league stage of IPL 2024, the question to which everyone is trying to get the answer is: Why did the Mumbai Indians replace Rohit Sharma with Hardik Pandya?
One cannot really fault Mumbai Indians. Rohit Sharma is the first captain of MI to win five IPL titles; he is also the highest run scorer for the franchise and is mainly the face of their turnaround in the Indian Premier League after five disappointing seasons since it got started in 2008.
Now almost everyone is wondering what the need is because Rohit is still going strong. He is still the captain of Team India in all formats, even though the fans of the Mumbai Indians are still trying to find an answer to this difficult question. Former cricketer Robin Uthappa of the Indian Cricket Team has come up with an explanation.
Uthappa said that there are three scenarios one should judge in order to understand the entire situation. The first one is the franchise Mumbai Indians. The second one is the newly appointed captain, Hardik Pandya, and the third one is Rohit Sharma, who is the former captain of the team.
Robin said that the Mumbai Indians had appointed Rohit as their captain in the middle of the 2013 IPL season while removing Australia legend Ricky Ponting. This decision was supported by everyone, even the fans. Uthappa said that statistically, Rohit was not having a good time with the bat in the last three to four seasons of the Indian Premier League; they had not won since 2020, so the team had to think of a change. No one is questioning the caliber of Rohit Sharma, but if you look from the franchise point of view, then they didn’t win in the last 3 years, and Rohit scored less than 300 runs, so there is a lack of a successful batsman along with a lack of a successful captain.
Rohit had not scored more than 400 runs since the 2019 IPL season; he had the worst season of his IPL career in 2022, where he scored only 268 runs at an average of 19 and a strike rate of 120. MI finished at the bottom of the points table for the first time in the history of the IPL with only two victories in 14 matches next year, and they did not make it to the playoffs. But the performance of Rohit Sharma with the bat was not up to his standards, with 332 runs at a strike rate of 132.
Uthappa further said that I may have made up their minds to look at other options at the end of last year’s IPL, but the narrative may have changed in the minds of the fans after the kind of success the opener achieved in the ODI World Cup, both as a captain and as a batsman.
