Ahmedabad: Vikram Rathour, batting coach of India, on Wednesday, said that that he does not want limited-overs vice-captain Rohit Sharma to change his batting style in T20Is.
Rathour's remark came ahead of India's five-match T20I series against England, starting Friday. All five T20Is will be played at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad.
Rohit, who is often under scanner for his performance in the longest format of the game, is enjoying a purple patch as he finished as the leading run-getter for India in just concluded four-match Test series.
"Somebody like Rohit has a very set game-plan and he has been extremely successful following that game-plan. So I would not really want him to change that. He is somebody who takes his time initially, gets set first, and then goes scores big. That has worked well for us. That has worked well for him. So I absolutely find no reason to change that at this point," Rathour was quoted as saying by a leading sports daily.
"Batting plans, again, in T20, yes, depending on what kind of the start of you have had, how many overs are left, so that is one format where you need to be very flexible with your batting plans or batting order. Anybody could be on at any point in time in the batting unit. That is the kind of mindset you need to have," he added.
KL Rahul has donned the wicketkeeping gloves for India in the white-ball formats off late, but for the England series, Rishabh Pant has been included and most likely, he will start off in the T20I series.
"KL has done really well as a wicketkeeper-batsman. He has been a superb cricketer, he has batted really well, he has kept reasonably well. Now Rishabh [Pant] (is) back in form and doing well, let's see how it goes. Once this situation comes, what the team management is looking to do, that'll happen on the day of the game and how this series goes," said Rathour.
India's T20I squad: Virat Kohli (captain), Rohit Sharma (vc), KL Rahul, Shikhar Dhawan, Shreyas Iyer, Suryakumar Yadav, Hardik Pandya, Rishabh Pant (wk), Ishan Kishan (wk), Yuzvendra Chahal, Varun Chakravarthy, Axar Patel, Washington Sundar, Rahul Tewatia, T Natarajan, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Deepak Chahar, Navdeep Saini, Shardul Thakur.
