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here's a particular kind of scrutiny reserved for players who've already won everything, and Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli are getting a fresh dose of it. Former India wicketkeeper Deep Dasgupta has told them, bluntly, that the runway to the 2027 ODI World Cup won't come with a grace period not one or two quiet games while they find their timing, and certainly not on reputation alone.
The trigger was the just-finished three-match ODI series in England, which India lost 2-1. On paper, that's a disappointing scoreline. Look closer at the two most-discussed careers in Indian cricket, though, and the story gets more layered. Kohli struggled early before turning it around with half-centuries in the final two matches. Rohit had a rougher start still two failures before answering with his 34th ODI hundred in the series finale at Lord's, becoming the first Indian batter to score an ODI century at that ground.
Good theatre. Also, according to Dasgupta, not good enough as a pattern going forward.
Speaking on his YouTube channel, Dasgupta didn't frame this as an attack on either player's ability — more a structural reality of where they are in their careers now. "You can't take one or two games to get into the groove," he said, adding that it's on the support staff to build an environment that gets the best out of players from ball one rather than match five.
That's the practical half of his argument. The other half is about how selection conversations get had or don't. Dasgupta's point was that four years ago, nobody was sitting Kohli or Rohit down before a series to reassure them their spot was safe. It was assumed, because the runs backed it up. His view: that dynamic shouldn't have changed just because retirement chatter has gotten louder.
He went further on why the noise has gotten louder specifically now. Both players walked away from Tests in 2025, and Rohit stepped back from T20Is after India's 2024 T20 World Cup win. ODIs are what's left. Dasgupta's read is that single-format players lose the cushion that multi-format players have fail in one format, and there's another to redeem yourself in. Fail in the only format you play, and that failure is what people remember until the next time you bat.
Dasgupta isn't a lone voice here, and that's arguably the more interesting part of this story than any single quote. Sourav Ganguly has said there's no guarantee either player makes it to 2027, noting the physical toll of a long international season on cricketers who'll be pushing 39 and 40 by the time the tournament starts in South Africa. AB de Villiers has made a similar point, tying Shubman Gill's promotion to the ODI captaincy directly to India's broader succession planning. Former India opener Aakash Chopra has taken a more optimistic line both players have a realistic shot, in his view while still flagging that limited match practice outside the IPL is a real problem.
Irfan Pathan landed somewhere in the middle: doable, but only if fitness and game time hold up, and only if the communication from team management stays honest. Reading across all of it, a consensus starts to form that has less to do with talent nobody's questioning that and more to do with volume. India have at least 27 ODIs scheduled before the World Cup. To stay automatic picks, Kohli and Rohit will likely need to be part of most of them.
There's no series to prove anything in immediately. India's next ODI assignment isn't until late September, when West Indies visit for a three-match series a gap that, depending on who you ask, is either a chance to reset or exactly the kind of layoff Dasgupta is warning against.
The BCCI, for its part, shut down the speculation that Lord's was Rohit's ODI farewell almost as fast as it surfaced. Both men remain very much part of the plan. Whether that plan survives contact with a genuinely poor run of scores rather than a nervy start followed by a rescue act is the question nobody, including Dasgupta, is pretending to have an answer to yet.
