Mumbai, Jan 24: It could be fear of failure among country’s elite batters that led to India’s global title drought between 2011 and 2024, T20 World Cup winning former skipper Rohit Sharma said on Friday.After the 50-over World Cup triumph in 2011 under the leadership of MS Dhoni, India waited till 2024 for another major trophy, winning the T20 World Cup under Rohit’s captaincy.“I have always believed that when the tide is going down, it’s not going to stay down forever. It will come up at some stage. But I didn’t think it would take 13 years. I didn’t think it would go down so much that it would take 13 years to come back up,” Rohit said in a JioHotstar show..
“The last World Cup we won was in 2011, and then we won again in 2024. That’s 13 years. Yes, we did win the Champions Trophy in 2013, so technically it was an 11-year ICC trophy drought. But 11 years is still a long time,” one of India’s greatest captains said.“We always believed that we had to keep doing the right things, and we did keep doing the right things. Unfortunately, something was missing. There was something we weren’t able to do. I felt it might have been a fear of failure creeping into all of us, maybe yes, maybe not, I don’t know, but that was my feeling.”
The former captain, who currently plays in the ODIs only, said the team management headlined by him and former head coach Rahul Dravid wanted to remove the fear by giving everyone freedom and clarity in their roles.
“We wanted to remove that fear. And how do you do that? By giving everyone freedom and clarity. By telling them, ‘You are the guy, you are going to do the job for me, and no matter what happens, we will back you as much as we can.’.“Along with that, giving clarity about their role and what we expect from them.’