Dubai not our home, Rohit Sharma rejects ‘unfair advantage’ claims

DUBAI: India captain Rohit Sharma fired back at critics who claimed that India enjoyed an unfair advantage in the Champions Trophy by playing all their matches in Dubai.
At a pre-match press conference before his team’s semifinal encounter against Australia, Rohit emphasised that Dubai was not Team India’s home venue.
Several cricket pundits, including former England captains Nasser Hussain and Michael Atherton, Australian captain Pat Cummins, and former Pakistan cricketers, took exception to India staying in Dubai for the entire duration of the tourney.
“Every time, the pitch is giving you different challenges. The three matches that we played here, the pitch behaved differently. This is not our home; this is Dubai. We don’t play so many matches here, and this is new for us too,” Rohit told the reporters ahead of the semifinal clash against Australia.
Rohit said his side needed to adapt to the surface quickly during the last-four match against the Aussies. “There are four or five surfaces that are being used here. See, I don’t know which pitch is going to be played in the semifinals. But whatever happens, we will have to adapt and see what is happening and what is not. And we will play on that,” he added.
Citing India’s last Group A match against New Zealand on Sunday to buttress his point, Rohit said, “We saw that when the (New Zealand) bowlers were bowling, it was swinging a little bit. We did not see it in the first two games when our bowlers were bowling. In the last game, we did not get to see that much spin; today there was a bit of it. So, there are different things happening on every surface.”
Rohit said that India’s choice of picking five spinners for the 2025 Champions Trophy was vindicated, and revealed that the decision was taken after monitoring the trend during the ILT20 here.
“Looking at the surface here, hearing about what happened in Dubai in the past two months, we somehow kind of knew that surfaces are going to be slow. We were watching ILT20, and we thought the slower bowlers would be a lot more helpful here. If we need an extra batter, then anyway Rishabh (Pant) is there,” he said.