On Wednesday, Rohit Sharma will play his 265th ODI. Ordinarily, this is not a major milestone. But then this is Rohit, who even among the extraordinary players, has found ways to be extraordinary.
Eighteen years into his ODI career, though, our guy is set to cross into uncharted territory. Ever since he played his first ODI his stats sheet has always shown a higher number under "high score" than "matches played". Ten years since setting the kind of record that people credibly contend may never be broken, Rohit is about to go past 264.
It is worth remembering and dwelling on the big-scoring Rohit right now. Worth recalling a time when Rohit stans would tell Virat Kohli stans that Rohit held his own at the tippy top of modern India batting.
Though Kohli was the mass-producer of hundreds, "once Rohit gets past 70, there's almost no stopping him," was one theory. In ODIs, it was difficult to deny. The man has three double-hundreds, which is three times as many as any other batter, and a quarter of all the 200-plus scores ever made in the format. Of the 31 hundreds he has scored, 16 have produced 130 runs or more.
Other batters merely "get in" on a track. Rohit embeds himself inside an opposition attack like the alien from Alien and feeds until he is half the size of the spaceship and they are withering husks.
Not lately, though. The more recent Rohit, in ODIs at least, is a highly-skilled DGAF figure - somebody who has seen it all, fought battles in all kinds of games there are to fight battles in, and picked the corner of ODI cricket he wants to shake up. Rohit has become predominantly a powerplay aggressor.
The numbers lay this out. Since the start of the 2023 ODI World Cup, Rohit has batted in 13 ODIs and failed to get a start only in two of them. If you jump in at the 20-ball mark of the other 11, he's striking at 150-plus (i.e. has more than 30 runs already) in seven of those innings, and at 100-plus in 10, the only exception being in an exceptionally difficult Lucknow pitch in the match against England, at the World Cup.
In the ongoing series in Sri Lanka, he has hit 58 off 47, and 64 off 44, on hugely spin-favouring tracks. These are pitches on which strike rates of as low as 80 are acceptable, so long as you make a half-century, as Rohit did on both occasions. But here, Rohit's starts on both occasions gave the middle order room to breathe while they attempted to hunt down modest scores.
In a previous age, Sri Lanka tightened their spin vices so effectively, that the pressure to score at a decent clip itself would produce wickets. In matches in which Rohit has peacocked his way through the early overs so spectacularly, Sri Lanka only had one route to victory - to dismiss the opposition. That they have done so twice is credit to their spinners on extremely dry surfaces.
While he is batting this way, it might be more appropriate to think of Rohit Sharma, a producer of some of the most epic ODI innings, as a player who might "come off" for a significant number of deliveries. Since the start of the 2023 World Cup, he has never really tried to play himself in - his control percentage at 79.79 in his first 25 balls in that period, but then improving to only 82.32 in the next 25 balls.
According to ESPNcricinfo's data, Rohit plays more "aggressive false shots" now than ever before, which effectively means the man is happy to play attacking strokes that feel poorly conceived when they don't come off. There are expansive drives against spinners early on, in which Rohit covers the line of the stumps and swings his bat at. There are safe mis-hits, where the bowler fooled Rohit, but he is still able hit to an area in which there is no protection. And there are shots like his attempted switch-sweep against Jeffrey Vandersay on Sunday, which saw him caught at backward point, and set in motion India's collapse.
And yet, though he has only occasionally middled the ball as emphatically as childhood coaches would love him to, Rohit has discovered the fun of hitting balls just okay. He has understood that hitting them well enough to clear the field means there are runs there too. It feels as if Rohit is in his most pragmatic era.
There is little doubt that he wants to continue, wants to contest big tournaments, and wants more silverware in his arms. But Rohit has also stepped into a phase of his career in which he is only one star in the galaxy. And right now, that star wants to reap as many early-overs runs as possible.