Sanjay Manjrekar believes Rohit Sharma is "going through a phase" and that the senior Mumbai Indians (MI) batter is at a stage in his career where he has to "push himself every morning".
Rohit fell for 8 in the IPL 2025 match against Gujarat Titans (GT) on Saturday, and it came after a four-ball duck against Chennai Super Kings (CSK) earlier in the tournament.
"Rohit Sharma is clearly going through a phase," Manjrekar said on JioStar. "He's not the Rohit Sharma of, say, three to four years ago. He's at a stage in his career where he has to push himself every morning - train hard and be at his best - because things are slipping away for him. He's still relying on his natural talent and instincts."
Rohit has gone through a lean patch in international cricket too. He had a horror run in Test cricket, starting with Bangladesh's tour of India in September 2024, with a top score of 52 (his only 50-plus score in this period) and an average of 10.93. He played his part in India's win in the Champions Trophy, though, regularly giving the team quick starts, even though he didn't go on to play a big innings, the 76 in the final against New Zealand the only time he got a half-century.
Five-time champions MI have lost both their games this season so far. After losing to CSK by four wickets, they lost to GT by 36 runs, struggling in the chase of 197 on a slow pitch.
This season, Rohit has a new opening partner in Ryan Rickelton, the South Africa batter, who has also struggled to get going in both games. While Manjrekar believes Rickelton - who's playing for the first time in the IPL - should be given more time to adjust, he does not think the MI line-up looks convincing enough.
"Ryan Rickelton, being a South African, will take time to adjust to Indian pitches," he said. "Very few South African batters, barring AB de Villiers and Heinrich Klaasen, have truly flourished on Indian pitches. So we'll have to give him time. Apart from that, Tilak Varma and Suryakumar Yadav, along with Robin Minz and some of the other players, form the batting line-up. However, to me, it still looks a little unconvincing.
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"And a lot of them rely on pitches where the ball comes on to the bat nicely. There's pace and bounce, and even in that chase where they needed 12 or 13 runs, if it had been at Wankhede Stadium, they would have likely come very close to the target."
While highlighting what went wrong for MI's batters against GT, Manjrekar, however, said it was early to judge how the team's rest of the season would go.
"Mumbai Indians didn't look in the race when they lost two wickets for 35 [against GT]. In comparison, Gujarat Titans had around 129 runs for their first two wickets. After that, it seemed like Tilak Varma and Suryakumar Yadav were trying to build a partnership. The challenge with building a partnership in a chase of over 190 is that the required run rate starts to suffer, and that's exactly what happened. In the end, you have to say that Gujarat Titans batted better - I thought they got maybe 15 to 20 runs over par.
"The dew never came in, which made Mumbai's job even more difficult. But despite all that, two losses are quite typical for Mumbai Indians. They still seem to be on the right track to go on and win the title [as they have done in the past, most memorably in 2014]."