Rohit Sharma's ODI Double Centuries and the Move to Open

By the spring of 2013 the case for persisting with Rohit Sharma had run out of arguments. He had played one-day international cricket since 2007, had been in and out of the side for six years, and had an average in the low thirties with two hundreds to show for it. He had been left out of the squad that won the 2011 World Cup at home, which for a player of his supposed gifts was close to a verdict. Selectors had begun using the word "talent" about him in the tone people reserve for a player they are preparing to drop.

The promotion, and the reasoning behind it

The change came at the 2013 Champions Trophy in England, when the team management moved him to open with Shikhar Dhawan. The logic was not that he had suddenly become a better player. It was that his weaknesses were middle-order weaknesses.

Rohit's method depends on seeing the ball early and playing it late, off the back foot, with very little movement before the delivery arrives. That works badly against a spinner bowling into the rough with a ring field and a required rate, which is what a number five or six faces most of the time. It works extremely well against a hard new ball on a good surface with two fielders outside the circle, because the pull, the cut and the punch through the covers are all available and the field cannot cover them.

The other half of it was temperament. Given a target and a rate, Rohit tended to hurry. Given an empty scoreboard and a session, he was content to take twenty overs to reach thirty, and it turned out that the innings which followed that start were enormous.

Three double hundreds, and the conversion habit

No other batter has scored an ODI double century more than once. Rohit has done it three times.

Score	Opposition	Venue	Date
209	Australia	Bengaluru	November 2013
264	Sri Lanka	Eden Gardens	November 2014
208*	Sri Lanka	Mohali	December 2017

The Kolkata innings remains the highest individual score in the format. He faced 173 balls, hit 33 fours and nine sixes, and was dropped early enough that the innings is often introduced with the caveat. What made it possible was not the hitting but the shape: he was 50 off 70-odd balls at one stage and then scored the remaining two hundred at better than two a ball. Almost every long Rohit innings has that profile. He does not accelerate gradually; he changes the terms once he is set.

The Bengaluru double is worth restoring to its context, because it tends to be treated as a warm-up for Kolkata. It came in the final match of a seven-game home series against Australia in which both sides treated 300 as a par score and 350 as gettable, a series that did more than any other to reset expectations of what fifty-over batting could be. Rohit's 209 that night was only months into his life as an opener. A batter who had been a middle-order question mark in April was, by November, taking apart a full-strength Australian attack for five hours. The Mohali innings of 2017 — the third double, an unbeaten 208 — was different again: measured, almost sedate for its first half, and then brutal, against a Sri Lanka attack that had dismissed him cheaply earlier in the series.

What the 264 rewrote

The history of the format's highest score is short enough to tell. Saeed Anwar's 194 against India in 1997 stood as the record for well over a decade, and for most of that time the double century was discussed as a theoretical limit, like the four-minute mile — approached, never reached. Sachin Tendulkar finally crossed it at Gwalior in 2010, unbeaten on 200 against South Africa. Virender Sehwag pushed the mark to 219 the following year. Rohit's 209 came two years after that, and the 264 arrived in November 2014.

What is striking is what has happened since: nothing. Chris Gayle and Martin Guptill both passed 200 at the 2015 World Cup, and other doubles have followed, but nobody has come near 264 in the decade since it was set. A record broken four times in five years has now stood for more than ten, through an era of bigger bats, shorter boundaries and higher scoring rates than the one it was made in. Either the innings was an outlier of a kind the format produces once a generation, or the two new balls have quietly made the last twenty overs harder for a set batter than they were in 2014. Both things are probably true.

The underlying statistic is conversion. Plenty of top-order batters reach fifty as often as Rohit does. Very few turn as high a proportion of those fifties into hundreds, and almost none turn hundreds into scores beyond 150 at his rate. That is the difference between a good opening record and his. A batter who makes 60 four times is worth less to a fifty-over side than one who makes 20, 20, 20 and 180, because the second pattern wins matches on its own.

The five hundreds of 2019

The 2019 World Cup is the clearest demonstration of the method over a whole tournament. Rohit scored 648 runs, more than anyone else in the competition, and made five centuries, which no batter had managed in a single edition. He made them against South Africa, Pakistan, England, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, in different conditions and at different tempos, and the tournament still ended with India losing a semi-final at Old Trafford in which he was dismissed for one.

That semi-final is a fair illustration of the risk in his method. A batter who needs fifteen overs to establish himself is a batter who can be removed cheaply on a seaming pitch under cloud, and India's top three all failed within the first four overs. On any of the other days of that tournament, the same approach produced a hundred.

The comparison people reach for is Tendulkar's 673 runs at the 2003 edition, which is the only individual aggregate at a World Cup that had exceeded it at the time. Both were achieved in campaigns that ended without the trophy, and both have the same odd texture in retrospect: a batter in the form of his life, in a team winning every week, remembered afterwards mainly for the one afternoon it stopped. Tournament cricket is unsentimental about six-week bodies of work, and Rohit's 2019 is probably the best World Cup batting campaign never to be attached to a title.

The opening partnerships that carried it

An opener's record is half a partnership record, and Rohit's had two distinct chapters. The first belonged to Shikhar Dhawan, his partner from the 2013 Champions Trophy onwards and for the better part of a decade. The pairing worked on complementary tempos: Dhawan attacked the new ball early, particularly square on the off side, which bought Rohit the quiet first ten overs his method needed. Between them they gave India a settled opening pair through three global tournaments, an arrangement whose value is best measured by how rarely the selectors had to discuss it.

The second chapter came late, with Shubman Gill, a partner fourteen years his junior. By then Rohit had inverted his own role — attacking early so that the younger batter could build — which meant that across ten years he had played both halves of the same partnership design. Few openers last long enough to do that; fewer still make the switch voluntarily, at the height of their seniority, because the team's shape asked for it.

The white-ball opener's problem, and how he solved it

Opening in one-day cricket got harder during Rohit's career rather than easier. Two new balls meant less reverse swing at the death but also a harder ball for longer at the start, and the fielding restrictions changed several times in ways that rewarded early aggression. Most openers of the period responded by attacking the powerplay and accepting a higher dismissal rate.

Rohit went the other way for most of the decade, and then changed his mind. From roughly 2023 he began treating the first ten overs as the phase in which to take risk rather than the phase in which to survive, a shift he made in his mid-thirties, and one that lowered his average while raising the team's scoring rate. He said as much openly: that the job as he now understood it was to give India a platform above six an over and that his personal figures were a secondary consideration.

Whether that was the right call is arguable and the numbers do not settle it. What is not arguable is that the change was deliberate, communicated and stuck to, which is rarer in international cricket than it should be.

The Test career that came from the same idea

The opening experiment was repeated in the longer format six years later, with a similar starting position. Rohit had made 177 on Test debut at Eden Gardens in 2013 and had then spent six years as a middle-order batter who scored heavily at home and nowhere else. Moved to the top of the order against South Africa in 2019, he made 176 and 127 in the same match at Visakhapatnam and a double hundred at Ranchi in the same series.

The follow-up mattered more. He made a hundred at The Oval in 2021 in conditions that had troubled him for a decade, an innings of 127 that set up India's win in that Test, and he scored consistently in Australia and England thereafter. He retired from Test cricket in May 2025 with more than 4,000 runs and twelve hundreds, and with the odd distinction of having been a better red-ball opener at 34 than he had been a red-ball middle-order batter at 27.

The scale of the one-day record

Set against his contemporaries, the volume is what stands out. Rohit has passed 11,000 one-day international runs and more than thirty hundreds, figures reached by very few players, and he has done it with a career that effectively began at 26. The six years before the promotion contributed almost nothing to the totals.

The obvious comparison is Virat Kohli, with whom he has shared an India top order for most of the last twelve years. The two records are built differently. Kohli's is a chasing record, accumulated in second innings under a required rate; Rohit's is a first-innings record, built on setting totals and on very large individual scores. India's one-day side spent a decade with one of each, which is close to an ideal arrangement and is the main reason they kept reaching finals.

The trophies, eventually

The trophy count took longer. Rohit was in the squad that won the 2007 World Twenty20 as a 20-year-old, making an unbeaten 30 in the final at the Wanderers, and then waited seventeen years for the next global title. He captained the side beaten by Australia in the final of the 2023 World Cup after ten consecutive wins, having led the tournament's scoring rate through the powerplay all the way to Ahmedabad.

The 2025 Champions Trophy closed that account with an ODI title, and his 76 in the final in Dubai took the match award. It is a neat symmetry: a career that began with a fifty-over batter who could not hold a place, and a fifty-over trophy won with an innings played exactly the way he had rebuilt himself to play. For his complete franchise and international figures, see the Rohit Sharma profile.