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India has just clinched the T20 World Cup title. There’s no ODI World Cup scheduled for another three years. However, Rohit Sharma isn’t too concerned. He believes that the three-match series against Sri Lanka remains at the highest level of international cricket.
It might be easy to view it mainly as a chance to try new things, but India sees it as a competition that deserves to be won on its own merits. In fact, Rohit Sharma’s competitive drive is so strong that even after retiring from T20Is and not being selected for the recent match, he still considers himself a T20I player in his mind.
Sri Lanka’s men’s team isn’t currently considered the best in ODI cricket, having finished ninth in the last World Cup and missing out on next year’s Champions Trophy. However, India is determined to bring their best to the series, according to Rohit Sharma.
“You get asked a lot whether this series is a preparation for the World Cup, or is this a preparation for the Champions Trophy,” he said. “It’s not a practice ground – it’ still an international game. We will keep in our minds what we want to achieve, but this is by no means preparation or practice or anything like that. We want to come here and play good cricket and get something out of the series.
“Of course we want to try everything possible, but when you’re representing the nation the quality of cricket should remain the way it is, and how we’ve played over the last few years. That is more important, rather than thinking about it as a preparation and saying let’s go out and chill in Colombo. We don’t think like that.
“When we play a series and when we play a game, we want to get something out of that. We might tell a bowler: ‘We want something different from you.’ We might tell a batter: ‘This is how we want you to play in the middle overs.’ We want to get something out of the series, but not at the cost of going out there and having no intent or purpose. For me the standard of Indian cricket is more important.”