India suffered a telling blow at the hands of Australia when the hosts failed to chase down 270 after their middle-order couldn’t conjure the required resilience and collapsed like a house of cards despite a bout of sturdy shows from Virat Kohli, KL Rahul and Hardik Pandya.
Rohit Sharma, the Indian captain had loads to talk about after India’s defeat as the skipper wasn’t particularly happy about what unfurled at Chennai, especially after coming so close. Once again, on closer inspection, it would reveal that India had their woes and even if they could have managed a win, it should have been nothing short of a miracle.
With so many questions to be answered, Indian captain, Rohit Sharma said, “I mean, it’s all up to the franchises now. The franchises own them [the players] now, so we’ve given some indications or some kind of borderline kind of thing to the teams. But at the end of the day it’s up to the franchise and, most importantly it’s the players you know, they have to take care of their own body.”
Here is what Rohit Sharma had to say about Team India’s outlook on IPL
He continued, “They [players] are all adults. So they have to look after their body and just if they feel that it’s getting a little too much, they can always talk about it and have a break in one or two games. I doubt [if] that will happen but.”
Rohit Sharma further added, “Look, yeah, it is concerning because … we are missing the players who are actually playing XI players, you know … they regularly play in the playing XI. But honestly, everyone’s trying their best to get everyone on the path, we’ve been focusing a lot on management of the players, which is why you keep seeing we have to rest certain players at certain point in time.”
Rohit Sharma summed up the feelings of the players after the Indo-Australian series
The Indian captain also said, “Obviously when you play so much cricket injuries are bound to happen. So not looking too much into it… what’s available to you, what’s in your hand, you can control that, and we are just trying to control all of that.”
He concluded by saying, “Players are frustrated as well. They want to play they don’t want to miss out. So yeah, I mean it is a little sad, but at the end of the day, you cannot really do too much. I can see, and I can vouch for it, that the people working behind the scenes are working really hard with all these players and freakish injury can happen at any point in time, like Shreyas [Iyer] was the best example. He was sitting the whole day and he just went to take a knock. And you know the injury happened to him. And there’s nothing you could do about it, and I mean, the only thing we can keep in mind is managing players and giving them enough breaks. And I think from our side we’re doing that.”
As the teams break for IPL, a lot of players will have to be careful about what or how they deliver in the biggest of stages, particularly with the World Cup and the WTC final on the horizon, Team India cannot afford any more injuries.
