Kolkata : Indian team is playing Border Gavaskar Trophy 2024-25 at Australia. However, after long patches of bad form, retirement rumours of senior players loom around.
With BGT standing at 1-1 after 3 Tests, several reports suggesting that any of the senior players or big names might hang their boots from the format due to form hitting rock bottom.
The rumours come after Ravichandran Ashwin shocking the cricket world after announcing his retirement in the wake of the third Test in Brisbane.
With speculations of fellow veteran player could retire, all eyes turn to the 3 oldest players in the Indian squad with Rohit Sharma, 37, Virat Kohli, 36, and Ravindra Jadeja, 36.
Cricket expert Bharat Sundaresan quoted Fox Cricket saying that either of Virat Kohli Or Rohit Sharma could retire from Test Cricket after Sydney Test, if Indian team fails to qualify for World Test Championship 2025 Final.
Both the veterans are facing gloomy and inconsistent form from long period of time, especially Indian skipper Rohit Sharma.
As per Bharat, the successful opening duo of KL Rahul and Yashasvi Jaiswal could be India’s key duo in upcoming years.
“The Rahul-Jaiswal opening partnership could be the one that holds Indian cricket together for the next four or five years. They complement each other well,” Sundaresan said on SEN.
“Even though Rahul’s been around for 10 years, he’s still just 32, so he can easily go on for another five, six years”.
“And I guess the onus then is on Rohit to find ways to score runs.”
Having struggled for runs for some time now, Sundaresan speculated that Rohit could be the one about to call it quits.
“The rumours doing the rounds in India when Ashwin retired — before it happened — was, ‘somebody big is retiring’. It happened to be Ashwin in Melbourne,” the cricket writer and broadcaster said.
“But then the thing was: this is not the only one. So, we’ll have to wait and see”.
“I mean, it has to be between Rohit and Virat, and I guess, say if India do not make the World Test Championship final, and because they don’t have any Test matches between now and then, and their next Test series is five Test matches in England, I can totally see a scenario where, if there is no WTC final to play — what’s there for Rohit Sharma to look forward to?”
“I’m not making a call on him, but if he doesn’t score runs — or even if he does score runs; it’s always good to go on a high — but for Rohit Sharma’s sake, hopefully that top order that he’s put so much talk on can provide him with a platform and he’s walking out to bat when it’s 4-180 and not 4-80.”
With such a situation, the only answer that the seniors – Rohit and Virat can give is with Bat and qualifying or winning WTC 2025.
