India captain Rohit Sharma expressed his satisfaction with the timing of his Indian captaincy when he was asked about his preference to be there at the peak of his career rather than the latter stages. Notably, Rohit took over the captaincy of Team India across formats last year and led the team to the top of the ICC rankings in Tests, ODIs, and T20Is as well.

Speaking to the Indian Express, Rohit Sharma said, “That’s life. I got it now and I am grateful for it. I would rather have it when I know how to captain a team, when I know what is required and all. Rather than when I don’t know the ABCD of captaincy. So in that respect, this is good. Just look at the names that are missed out – Gautam Gambhir, Virender Sehwag. These are all stalwarts of Indian cricket. Not to forget Yuvraj Singh. He never captained India. Yuvraj has been such a match winner for India, he should have been the captain at some stage but he didn’t get it,” he added.

However, Rohit Sharma also added that leading the side at the prime of his career would have been ideal but he also felt it was only fair for him to wait for his turn after MS Dhoni and Virat Kohli as well.

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“Obviously, you want to be at your peak for this, say when you are 26-27. But you cannot always get what you want. You are talking about the Indian captaincy and there have been stalwarts in the Indian team. Many more players deserved to be the captain of the team. I had to wait for my turn and that’s absolutely fair enough. The guys before, Virat was before me, so was MS (Dhoni),” he expressed.

Meanwhile, Jasprit Bumrah’s fitness through the World Cup 2023 will be the biggest concern for him. Rohit Sharma also felt managing the workload and fitness of the pace bowlers will be the biggest challenge as well. However, they have four pace bowling options apart from Bumrah – Hardik Pandya, Mohammed Shami, Mohammed Siraj, and Shardul Thakur.

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“A team needs to play 11 games to reach the World Cup final. Last time we played this format was in 2019, but to play 11 ODIs in one-and-half months is not easy. It’s a long World Cup. We don’t want any of our pacers to break down. Hence we have selected more of them,” Rohit Sharma concluded. “In the 2011 team, everybody was a big name. Did any position change? No. You suddenly didn’t have to bring Harbhajan Singh at number 4-5 because all the guys are match winners in the positions that they play. Now we have a lot of newer faces. We had an injury problem, two players (Rahul and Shreyas) are making a comeback after two months. So, things looked different and selection calls had to be made.”