Indian cricket team captain Rohit Sharma has showered lavish praise on fellow opener Yashasvi Jaiswal and believes that the youngster has the talent and attitude needed to succeed at the highest level.
The Rajasthan Royals opener enjoyed a dream debut to his Test career in the Caribbean last year with a match-winning knock of 171 against the West Indies.
Since then, Jaiswal has grown strength-to-strength, amassing 1217 runs from 11 matches at an impressive average of 64.05. The southpaw is currently third among Test batters as per ICC’s latest ranking list.
The 22-year-old’s fledgling Test career has already seen him score three hundreds and seven fifties from his first 20 innings. He went on to convert two of those hundreds into double centuries against England, in the same series, earlier this year.
"The guy (Yashasvi Jaiswal) has got real talent. He has got the game to play in all sorts of conditions. Obviously, very new to international cricket, so it's very hard to judge right now. But he has got all the ingredients for success at this level,” Rohit said during the press conference ahead of India's first Test against New Zealand in Bengaluru.
"What he has shown us in this brief period of time, you can bet on him and expect him to do wonders for the team. He has come through the ranks. He has played a lot of domestic cricket, Under-19 cricket. And obviously, has succeeded as well. That is why he is right now playing for India."
Jaiswal is the top run-getter for India in the World Test Championship 2023-25 cycle and also holds the distinction of being the Indian batter with the most runs in a single edition of the WTC. He went past Ajinkya Rahane’s tally of 1159 runs from the WTC 2019-21 edition during the recently concluded Test series against Bangladesh.
"He is somebody who wants to learn the game, learn about batsmanship, which is always a nice thing. When a youngster comes into the team, his mindset is quite critical. And the mindset that he has shown, he always wants to learn, always wants to improve, not happy with what he has achieved which is obviously a great start to a young career,” Rohit explained.
Jaiswal displayed his full repertoire of shots during the two-match Test series against Bangladesh. In the first game in Chennai, when the conditions were favourable for bowlers, he came up with a patient half-century in the first innings to hold the team together during a tricky phase.
Having lost more than two days due to rain in the second Test at Kanpur, Jaiswal, along with Rohit Sharma, set the platform to force a result. He scored a 31-ball 50 to power India to the fastest team 50, 100 and 150 in Tests and backed it up with another fifty in the second innings to see the team through.
"So far in his short career, he has shown what he is capable of. I mean, we found a great player. It does obviously bode well for our team as well being a left-hander, being an aggressive batter, it bodes well for the team. Hopefully, he can just continue to do what he has done in the last year or so," Rohit Sharma concluded.
