Rohit Sahrma's decade-long MI captaincy tenure came to an end, after the MI management decided to make Hardik Pandya the captain of the team in IPL 2024. Hardik Pandya was traded in by MI from Gujarat Titans in an all-cash deal ahead of the IPL 2024 auction.
Rohit Sharma won the IPL with Mumbai Indians five times- 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2020. He is one of the most successful captains in Indian Premier League history. However, it was still shocking for the MI fans that the management took away captaincy from Rohit and gave it to Hardik Pandya.
Mark Boucher, the MI coach, in an interview, revealed that it was a 'cricketing decision'.
"I think it was purely a cricketing decision. We saw the window period to get Hardik back as a player. For me it's a transition phase. A lot of people don't understand in India, people get quite emotional, but you know you take the emotions away from it. I think it's just more of a cricketing decision that was made and I do think it is going to bring the best out of Rohit as a person as a player. Just let him go out and enjoy and score some good runs," Mark Boucher said the on Smash Sports podcast.
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Boucher stressed on the intention of the MI think tank is to take the burden and hype of captaincy away from Rohit who has had a couple of ordinary seasons with the bat by his standards.
"One thing I did pick up with Ro (Rohit) is that he is a fantastic guy. I mean he's been captaining for ages and he's done really well for Mumbai Indians. Now he also leads India as well. It is that he walks into a place and there's just cameras in it and he's so busy and he hasn't had probably the best couple of seasons of late with the bat but he's done well as a captain.
And I just thought you know when we're speaking with the whole Mumbai Indians group, we thought that maybe this is the opportunity for him to step as a player. We believe he got some great value to add and just go out there and actually enjoy it without the hype of being a captain," Boucher said.
However, whatever Boucher said an as explanation for removing Rohit Sharma as captain the of MI team, didn’t sit well with Rohit’s wife Ritika Sajdeh. She was not impressed with the reasoning behind Hardik Pandya taking over as captain of MI.
She commented on the video: “So many things wrong with this..”
