‘Sky is the limit for the Indian cricket team’: Dinesh Karthik | Cricket News

Dinesh Karthik is the batting coach of the Royal Challengers Bengaluru in the IPL.

Bengaluru: Had India not won the Champions Trophy in Dubai, it is quite conceivable that Rohit Sharma’s place at the helm of the Indian cricket team would have come under scrutiny. He was on a perilously slippery slope, having fared poorly with the bat in back-to-back series losses against New Zealand and Australia in red-ball cricket. Forget captaincy, his place in the side was questioned. And in Dubai, he faced criticism over his fitness.
But success in the white-ball version has shone the spotlight on his leadership acumen. Former Indian wicketkeeper Dinesh Karthik, who was part of the Indian team when they won the Champions Trophy in 2013, watched Rohit and his men’s successful journey from the commentary box recently. He believes Sharma’s leadership skills are second to none.
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Speaking at RCB Innovation Labs, Indian Sports Summit here on Friday, Karthik said: “In the past nine months, this Indian team has won two massive competitions (T20 World Cup and Champions Trophy). So, I think the sky’s the limit for them because they are led by a very able leader in Rohit Sharma. You can see that he’s got the respect of his peers. Most importantly, he walks the walk and talks the talk with how cricket needs to be played.”

Still, even with the best leadership, one needs a smattering of talent to go the distance in a multi-team event and the fact wasn’t lost on Karthik. “The beauty of this Indian team is the strength and depth that they have in terms of the number of players that they’ve got,” he said. “Not many countries today can say that they can field two or three teams in international cricket and have them competing with each other.”
Did the IPL have a role in India’s near dominance of white-ball cricket? “India right now is in a very privileged and blessed place where they have such a good assortment of cricketers across skill sets. They could easily compete for the next decade or so considering the assembly line of players that the IPL and Indian domestic cricket are producing. The value in terms of understanding pressure, the big moments is what makes this Indian team really special,” said Karthik, who was in conversation with former England player and commentator Isha Guha and Mo Bobat, Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s Director of Cricket.

Dinesh Karthik (C) spoke at the RCB Innovation Labs, Indian Sports Summit in Bengaluru.

The 39-year-old gloveman went on to say: “In a lot of sporting environments, superpowers don’t go on to win tournaments. It’s always a challenge sometimes to just manage and assemble a group of players that produces results.”
Once known as the T20 ‘razzmatazz’, Karthik believes the IPL, which turns 18 this year, has ensured a paradigm shift in perception and practice.
“For a long time, Team India has been a cricketing nation which used to be happy competing, but now that attitude has changed. We want to win, and fans expect the team to win. That is what IPL has done. The influx of money has meant financial benefits that teams and stakeholders earn and a lot of it has gone back into infrastructure. When infrastructure grows, eventually the quality of sport develops and that’s the two biggest takeaways I think post the introduction of IPL in 2008,” said the current RCB batting coach and mentor.

Karthik, who made his IPL debut for the erstwhile Delhi Daredevils, reflected on playing alongside Australian pace Glenn McGrath and the takeaways from it “For me the whole ideology of how Australia played at that time was a massive shock. They felt like a pack of wolves out to win every game. But with IPL, in my first year I got to spend time with Glenn McGrath in close quarters and practice with him. I got to know him better and became comfortable, that helped the confidence and mindset of competing with the best,” he said at the Padukone Dravid Centre of Excellence.
COUNTRY VS FRANCHISE TALENT IDENTIFICATION
Highlighting the difference between talent identification for a national team and a franchise, Bobat, who quit his role as performance director of the England men’s team to join RCB in 2023, stated, “In international cricket we often found that you were trying to really unpick and make sense to identify talent that was playing at a level beneath international cricket and making predictions about whether that talent could thrive at the level above. Coming over to RCB, firstly, it’s an international market because you have overseas players. Understanding Indian talent is quite hard because of the volume and unstructured nature of it as well. So, finding talent in India is a much bigger challenge than it is finding it in the UK, but in a good way.”