A day after fellow veteran Virat Kohli showed age is just a number, Mumbai Indians opener Rohit Sharma produced a match-defining half-century against \u200bKolkata Knight Riders on Sunday to underline that his appetite for runs \u200cremains as strong as ever.<\/p>\n
Rohit, who turns 39 next month, led Mumbai to five Indian Premier League (IPL) titles before Hardik Pandya replaced him as captain ahead of the 2024 season.<\/p>\n
Like 37-year-old Kohli, \u200bRohit restricts his India duties to the 50-overs format but he has begun \u200bthe elite Twenty20 tournament intent on proving he is still very much \u2060a match-winner.<\/p>\n
“He’s freed himself up,” Coach Mahela Jayawardene said after Rohit’s 78 off \u200b38 balls helped Mumbai chase down 221 in a six-wicket victory in their tournament opener \u200bat home.<\/p>\n
“He’s thinking much calmer, he’s not the leader, there’s less pressure on him. This happens it happened to me as well in my last few years when I went and played franchise \u200bcricket,” added the former Sri Lanka captain.<\/p>\n
“You practise less, but your memory your muscle \u200bmemory it works. And you just go with the flow, you know, what the bowlers are trying \u200cto \u2060do. And once you’re in that mode, you have that freedom which we’ve noticed in Rohit in the last couple of years.<\/p>\n
“We encourage him to go and do that, and the rest of the team is backing him to do that and I’m \u200bquite happy about it.”<\/p>\n
Rohit, \u200bwhose last competitive outing \u2060was in India’s home one-day series against New Zealand in January, returned for the new IPL season looking leaner and fitter.<\/p>\n
He \u200bjoined the Mumbai camp early and played plenty of practice matches \u200bbefore going \u2060on to register his 50th 50-plus score in the IPL on Sunday.
\n“We had a lot of simulations for him, especially to get him going, and I was quite happy the \u2060way \u200bhe was hitting the ball. I thought he batted \u200bbrilliantly,” Jayawardene said.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, Kohli smashed an unbeaten half-century to anchor defending champions Royal Challengers Bengaluru to a \u200bcommanding victory over Sunrisers Hyderabad.<\/p>\n
–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":13792,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[20],"class_list":["post-30334","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-sport","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"Kohli smashed an unbeaten half-century to anchor defending champions Royal Challengers Bengaluru.","published_date":"","news_description":"Kohli smashed an unbeaten half-century to anchor defending champions Royal Challengers Bengaluru.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/30334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/30334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30335,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/30334\/revisions\/30335"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=30334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}