Why doesn't Rohit make runs in the IPL?

He's a modern-day legend across formats - except when he puts on a Mumbai Indians shirt. Why does that happen?

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Doctors say that there is something called a door handle conversation. Where a patient will turn up, ask a bunch of small questions that don’t amount to much, and then just as they are leaving, they suddenly say, ‘Oh, and I have chest pains or syphilis.’

A lot of times, they are looking for the courage to ask their special question. They’re also worried whether their concern is silly or valid. Maybe they need to build trust with their physician. There are lots of reasons.

It is not always easy to ask the big questions, the confusing ones, and the queries that don’t quite fit. Like let’s say hypothetically, you had a World Cup-winning captain, a man with three double hundreds in ODIs, who changed his trajectory and found his talent mid-way through a Test career. A bonafide all-format batting legend with a lovely collection of trophies. This would be a player who would be beyond questions, or queries, just an automatic legend.

Yet, perhaps as you leave the room, you just turn around and say, “But how can someone as good as Rohit Sharma not be better in the IPL?”

It is absolutely extraordinary that a player as good as Rohit Sharma, who has batted in the top order of a great team, on a decent wicket, has never scored 600 runs in a year. 17 years without that many runs is such a weird record. For MS Dhoni, it makes a lot more sense, he bats down the order. Manish Pandey is a great journeyman, and hasn’t played that many full years. He’s also on his seventh team.

Even the players who have done it in 16 years are not like Rohit Sharma level players. Outside of Quinton de Kock, Gautam Gambhir and Aaron Finch, most of the players here have a pretty good excuse for not having one big year.

Rohit has not always batted in the top three, but he has mostly. And he’s been the anchor. It should have happened at least once in a season. But it hasn’t. Rohit Sharma is a great batter, pretty much everywhere except the IPL.

And we did a cosine similarity matrix, which is really just a nearest neighbour analysis. The player he is most like is not a surprise, it’s Virat Kohli. Another top order anchor who has played a million years.

In terms of where he has batted, you can see why they are so similar. Both just over a third in the powerplay, almost identical in the middle. And then Rohit has a little more at the end, but that could also be from his years batting lower down the order.

But that does not explain how Virat Kohli has so many high scoring years and Rohit Sharma does not. This is not a close conversation. Robbie Uthappa picked Kohli as his greatest IPL batter. I think you can argue that he isn’t, but he is certainly in any conversation. Rohit Sharma isn’t even close. And counting stats aren’t everything.

But it’s not like Rohit has a great impact early in his innings either. It takes him 20 balls to have a positive impact on the game. Most of the players behind him are uber anchors. Yet, Rohit does not have the runs of that kind of player.

The real issue is, outside the first few balls, he’s really quite slow in many matches, and he needs to face four overs to really get back into the positive. And being that he doesn’t make many runs, he often doesn’t catch up.

If you look at impact by match, outside a great start to his career, he really hasn’t had a positive impact for long periods of time. There is simply way too much red on this for what is one of the greatest all format batters in history.

But, when you look at it by season, he was a plus player until 2018. Yes, there are some poorer years, but that is a really good career till that point. Since then it’s been horrendous. He had one golden season last year, but is struggling again this time. But the key period is early Rohit - until 2013 he was on the way to a great career.

Back in those days, he was more of a number four. And you can see how dominant he was in that spot. Since then, largely as an opener, he’s been a slight positive on striking, but negative on average. Certainly not a hopeless player, but also not a plus.

Also, because it’s Rohit, we have to talk about him vs left-arm pace bowling. Clearly, he’s not good at it, though it hasn’t stopped him scoring fast. But I think the real issue is that outside of right-arm pace, he’s not dominant against anything. Offies he can stay in against and scores above par. But even then, it’s not a massive impact, and when the ball spins away he really struggles.

And when you look at him by true 0-6s, there is a clear pattern here. He hits an arseload of sixes against pace bowling, but he is truly unremarkable in every other way against both bowling types. He’s not bad at anything outside of twos and threes, which he avoids with glee. But he’s also not really good at anything else. So reading this, you would say that if you are bowling right-arm pace to him he’ll hit it for six. That is an elite skill, and so weirdly, his only one.

That should make him better in the powerplay though, what with all the seam bowling he faces. And he’s not great there. A similar thing happens in the 7-11 over period, where he’s even slower, but still not a plus on average. Later on he’s better, that is when he wants to smash, and maybe that’s a holdover from the old way Indian players would get set and then explode at the death.

That does explain why in so many of his years he’s been a slow starter to the game. Some of these early years have been affected because wickets have fallen in the powerplay, and he’s come in down the order. But he’s also had plenty where that’s not the case.

And so you’d definitely say, he is not an opener. His numbers in the IPL suggest batting at number four, or brief times at five, is his best. But it’s Rohit Sharma, we know these numbers don’t hold up. He can open everywhere, red ball, white ball, World Cups and Champions Trophies. Except for Mumbai.

Of the openers with more than 2000 runs, only Parthiv Patel has a worse record. Rohit is nowhere near the great anchors like KL Rahul and Virat Kohli. Players like Gayle, Warner, Gilchrist and Sehwag are playing another sport entirely. You change the Indian blue for the Mumbai one, and he reverts to the Nohit Sharma of the early memes.

Nothing shows it better than this. For a long time he was a similar player for India as he was for Mumbai. Before 2015 there wasn’t a huge split. As an Indian batter he is one of the best players in the world. Add Mumbai to the front of that, and he’s not. Rohit Sharma 3.0, the high-intent machine, stops completely when playing for his franchise.

But sometimes your worth can be hidden, like maybe Rohit is a beast in wins. Most players will have a better record when their team gets the W, but these are the numbers of a decent player, not a star.

I was less interested in the winning games, and more the winning seasons. The times when Mumbai won more than 50% of their matches. I wondered if there was some kind of boost he had in those seasons. Clearly again, he’s better in the winning seasons, but there still isn’t some boost that helps Mumbai with the bat in those years.

And in terms of the true values of the main Mumbai players, he’s certainly not bad, and he’s a slight plus in both metrics. But you see him on the chart next to Krunal Pandya. He’s nowhere near the other well known batters of his franchise.

If you widen that out to the league and you look at the great players with 4000 runs, he’s at the wrong end of the graph. He’s nowhere near the best players ever in any metric. Not big runs in a year, not average, not strike rate, not impact.

We know he can do all of these things, we have seen it time and time again. But just not for Mumbai.

Doctors rule things out when making a diagnosis. They go through lists until they come to their best conclusion and then treat from there. What would they say of Rohit, though? The evidence doesn’t make sense. The only sensible conclusion is that he’s allergic to the material that Mumbai use for their kits, and that comes out in a rash that only affects his batting.

Rohit Sharma should be one of the greatest batters in IPL history, and he isn’t.