The Indian skipper tried to play down some of the excess hype around the looming T20 World Cup encounter.
Rohit Sharma doesn’t find the word “pressure” amusing when associated with the India-Pakistan rivalry. The Indian skipper likes taking it as a “challenge” instead as he tried to play down excess tension around his team’s much-anticipated T20 World Cup clash on Sunday (October 23) at the MCG.
Speaking at a press conference on the eve of the high-voltage encounter versus the neighbours, Rohit brushed aside the word pressure when queried over his feelings heading into the game. The Indian opener said his team isn’t taking the burden of expectations and is rather focused on doing their job correctly on the field.
Like all previous Indian captains approaching a World Cup clash against Pakistan, Rohit Sharma attempted to keep the hype at bay and suggested his men will be stepping at MCG like they would for any other game of the competition.
“Yeah, look, I don’t want to use the word “pressure” because pressure is constant. It’s not going to change ever. I would like to take this as a challenge. I want to use that word “challenge” a little more,” Rohit said. “This Pakistani team is a very challenging team. All the Pakistani teams that I’ve played from 2007 until 2022, they’ve been a good team.”
“It’s just that I believe on that particular day kind of a thing. On that particular day, if you’re good enough, you’ll beat any opposition, and on that day, you are good, you’ll take the win and you’ll go home.”
Heading into the game, much of the talk has revolved around Pakistan’s impressive comeback in the rivalry, wherein they’ve twice defeated India over the past one year. Babar Azam & company broke the India jinx for their country in T20 World Cups in Dubai and then conquered the neighbouring challenge at a critical Super 4s game of the Asia Cup 2022.
That has not only given Pakistan momentum and confidence, but also changed perceptions about them being pushovers to the Indians, who have struggled to overcome their robust bowling attack in the past few encounters and are missing their ace quick Jasprit Bumrah.
Rohit was mindful of that when he said, “Pakistan have been good in the last World Cup. They beat us. They were good in Asia Cup. We were good, too, but we won the first game and they won the second one. But unfortunately, we were out of the Asia Cup because the important games that we didn’t win made us see out of the tournament.”
“But yeah, look, they’ve been playing good cricket of late, and you know their brand of cricket. Luckily for us, we got to play them in Asia Cup twice, otherwise we don’t play them at all.”
“So it’s very hard to gauge what sort of mindset they play with, and for those two games that we played in Asia Cup, obviously there were a few guys missing from their squad and from our squad, as well.”
“So it’s important to understand — we’ve got to understand what is their strength, what is their weakness, so we’ve tried speaking about those kind of things,” he added.
