Graeme Smith explains why Rohit Sharma is feeling pressure of captaincy: 'It's just obviously...'

Former South Africa captain Graeme Smith has explained the reason why Rohit Sharma is feeling the burden of captaincy. Notably, India recently lost to Australia in the World Test Championship final (WTC final) by 209 runs under the leadership of Rohit Sharma.

Earlier, India lost an ODI series against Bangladesh in December last year, faced defeat in the semi-final of the T20 World cup 2022 and crashed out of the Asia Cup 2022 as well under the captaincy of Rohit Sharma.

Smith has pointed out that the dip in the personal form of the 36-year-old has rubbed on his captaincy as well. The former opener pointed out that Rohit Sharma has failed to score runs consistently in international cricket as well as the IPL.

In the WTC final 2023, the right-hand opener scored 15 and 43 across the two innings. In the IPL 2023, the Mumbai Indians (MI) captain scored 332 runs in 16 matches at an average of 20.75. In the T20 World Cup 2022, Rohit Sharma scored 116 runs in six matches at an average of 19.33 and a strike rate of 106.42.

“One of the biggest challenges of a captain is your own personal performance. The pressure of a leader never goes away. Rohit probably needs to just refresh. His own form hasn’t been probably at a level consistently. We look at the IPL over a number of years now and obviously the WTC final…he is having a bit of a rough patch and often that personal performance can just settle things down a little bit,” the 42-year-old Times of India in an interview.

“No one is criticizing his captaincy or leadership style. It’s just obviously on the personal performance side, if he can get some really good scores behind him, it takes a lot of that pressure away,” he added.

With the ODI World Cup 2023 approaching, Rohit would be hoping to quickly turn both - his captaincy and batting form - in his favour. He will be next seen leading India in the upcoming tour of West Indies which starts with the first Test from July 12.