“After the final, it was very difficult to come back and start moving forward, so I decided I needed to go somewhere and take my mind off it.”
ESPNcricinfo Staff
The ODI World Cup final loss to Australia hit India captain Rohit Sharma so hard that “it was very difficult to come back and start moving forward”. Speaking to fans helped him heal, he said in a social media video on Wednesday.
Twenty-four days after the final in Ahmedabad, which India lost after winning all ten of their games heading into the title clash, Rohit posted the message on Instagram, saying: “I had no idea how to come back from this. The first few days I didn’t know what to do. You know, my family, my friends, they kept me going, they kept things pretty light around me, which was really helpful.
“It wasn’t easy to digest, but life goes on. You have to move on in life. But, honestly, it was hard. It wasn’t so easy to move on.
“I always grew up watching World Cup 50 and for me this was the ultimate prize. We worked all these years for this World Cup… and it’s disappointing, right? If you don’t get it, and you don’t get what you want, what you were looking for all this time, what you dreamed of, you get disappointed and disappointed too sometimes.”
Australia, now six-time ODI World Cup champions, had lost their first two World Cup games – one of them in India – before embarking on a hot streak that culminated in lifting the trophy. In the final, on a pitch later rated “average” by the ICC, where Australia brought their most ruthless game to the table, India posted 240, which they chased down with seven overs in hand for a six-wicket win wicket
“I thought we did everything we could from our side. If someone asks me, what went wrong… because we won ten games, and in those ten games, yes, we made mistakes, but that mistake happens in every game you play. You can’t have a perfect game. You can have a near perfect game. But you can’t have a perfect game,” Rohit said. “If I look at it from the other side, I’m really proud of the team as well. Because the way we played was just brilliant. You can’t play like that in every World Cup. And I’m pretty sure I’m At the very least, the way we played up until that final, it would have given people a lot of joy, a lot of pride, watching the team play.”
Rohit said he had to get away from it all after the World Cup final to wrap his head around what had happened. And that his interactions with people he met helped him “heal.”
“After the final, it was very difficult to come back and start moving forward, so I decided I needed to go somewhere and take my mind off it,” he said. “But then, wherever I was, I realized that people were coming up to me and appreciating everyone’s effort, how well we played. I feel for all of them. Everyone with us, they dreamed of lifting this world. Cup, with us.
“Everywhere we went during the whole World Cup campaign, there was so much support from everyone, who was first on the pitch, and the people watching from home as well. I want to appreciate what the world has done for us, in But then again, if I think about it more and more, I feel very disappointed that we couldn’t go all the way.
“To see, you know, people coming up to me, telling me that they were proud of the team, you know it made me feel really good to a degree. And with them, I was healing. I felt, okay, these are the things you want to hear. When you meet people, when they understand what the player must be going through and when they know things like that… and not take out that frustration, that anger, it means a lot to us, it definitely meant a lot to me because there wasn’t anger, it was just pure love from the people I met and it was great to see. So it motivates you to go back and start working again and look for another ultimate prize.”