'You will get an answer, for certain': Rohit Sharma on T20I future

Rohit Sharma gave away nothing on his white-ball future on the eve of the first Test against South Africa. Nor did he address the hot-topic of his role at Mumbai Indians after Hardik Pandya was named captain. Instead, the India captain went with humour to answer some of the burning questions.

Before the press conference started, he smiled and told everyone, “No questions on IPL. Only on Indian cricket team.” Someone pushed their luck and enquired, “it’s a press meet, we can ask.” Rohit pointed to the BCCI logo on his crest to signal it’s a board-organised press meet.

With that out of the question, it was time to ask about his white-ball future.

Where does Rohit, the batter, see himself in two years? “I will play whatever cricket is there in front of me,” he said in a loaded answer.

The next question was more direct. “Do you seniors, you, Virat (Kohli) feel desperation to play T20 World Cup?” He replied: “Desperation cricket khelne ke liye sabko hai (We are all desperate to play cricket). Everyone wants to do well whatever chances they get,” he said.

And, then, he stopped teasing and said what everyone was tip-toeing around.

“I know what you are trying to ask. You will get an answer, you will, for certain,” said Rohit as he tried to suppress his grin.

On a serious note, he admitted that the ODI World Cup final defeat, a month ago, was a bitter pill to swallow for everyone in the team.

“The World Cup until the final the way we played, you expect to go an inch further. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do it and that was the hard part, take that, honestly we have all these years worked hard for it, and you saw how we managed to play the first 10 games and the final,” he said.

“Obviously, we didn’t do certain things well in the final and that cost us the match, there were not many things we could point out that we didn’t do this right or we didn’t do that right,” said Rohit, sounding practical in his thought process.

Just like he had said in an Instagram video, Rohit felt the love of the fans had got him back to playing cricket after the loss to Australia in the final.

“It’s hard (to overcome) from a loss like that, but there’s so much happening in life and there’s so much cricket happening, move on from that (World Cup loss), it took time to come out from that and you got to look forward,” he added.

“Honestly, I got a lot of messages from the outside world as well and that motivated me personally to get up and start doing my job again,” he concluded.