Former Australian fast bowler Glenn McGrath has put Rohit Sharma over Sachin Tendulkar in his list of top 5 Indian ODI batters of all time, in addition to surprisingly leaving out former opening batter Virender Sehwag. Rohit has played a total of 276 one-day matches for India since making his debut against Ireland in June 2007 and has scored a total of 11,370 runs, whereas Tendulkar finished his ODI career with 18,426 runs in 463 matches. Of those 18,426 runs, Tendulkar scored more than 3000 against Australia itself.
In his list of top five Indian ODI batters of all time, McGrath included Virat Kohli at the No. 1 position, and he was followed by Rohit, Tendulkar, MS Dhoni and Yuvraj Singh.
Speaking about Rohit, McGrath said, “My No. 2 (is) Rohit Sharma.
His stats in one-day cricket and the way he played the game (is) unbelievable. Three double hundreds and the highest score of 264 is just unheard of. Unbelievable. 276 matches over 11,000 runs. Probably a little bit unfortunately earmarked as a one-day specialist, his stats at Test cricket should have been better because he was a class player. I would put him at No. 2, and at No. 1, it’s hard to go past Virat Kohli.”
“You look at the runs he scored, the average, and the strike rate – unbelievable. We saw that the other night,” he added.
Rohit has a very good ODI batting record against Australia, both in India and in Australia. He scored his first double century (209) against them in 2013 at M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru and has five ODI centuries against Australia in Australia.
In the recently concluded three-match ODI series between India and Australia, Rohit played all three matches and registered scores of 8, 73 and 121 to finish as the highest run getter and win the Player Of The Series award.
He is also the only cricketer to score 1000 runs in India-Australia ODI matches played in Australia and, during his 121-run knock in the third match between the two teams at SCG on October 25, also became the second batter to score 2500 runs against Australia in one-day cricket.
