On the eve of Mumbai Indians’ last Indian Premier League fixture against Lucknow Super Giants, head coach Mark Boucher sat down with Rohit Sharma to analyse the season. During the conversation, Boucher asked Rohit about his future plans, to which the India captain replied, “It’s the T20 World Cup…”
After being removed as a captain of the Mumbai Indians this season, there were debates about Rohit’s future in the franchise and the tournament as well. However, after a long conversation with the India skipper, Boucher believes that Rohit is the ‘master of his own destiny’.
“It’s a big auction next season. Who knows what’s going to happen? We will have to take each day as it comes,” Boucher said while terming this as a season of two halves for Rohit, who scored 417 runs in 14 outings. “It was almost a season of two halves for him. He started really well, was hitting the ball sweetly in the nets, and got a great hundred against CSK as well,” Boucher said.
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“We honestly thought that he was on a great path for us to go out there and get some good runs for us. Unfortunately, it’s just the nature of T20 as well,” he added.
Having seen Rohit from close quarters for two seasons, Boucher believes that the star batter continued to adapt to the new way of playing as an aggressive opener. “He went out there trying to be aggressive, which is the new way of playing as an opening batter. He got a couple of low scores, which unfortunately didn’t help us in that particular situation,” he said.
“But he finished off with a fantastic knock — a competition of two halves for him. If you had to ask Ro, he’d probably say that it was an average season for him, especially with the start that he got off to,” Boucher added.
As Mumbai Indians ended another disappointing season, Boucher did not hesitate to admit that there would be a fair assessment of what went wrong in the season and then a call would be taken about the future of the coaching group – including him.