Sandeep Patil names the Kohli-Rohit contradiction nobody else will: 'It puzzles me'
Former India chief selector Sandeep Patil has finally said out loud the thing a lot of people have been quietly thinking. Speaking to Mid Day, he called Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma's T20I retirements puzzling because both players are still picking up bats in the IPL every week. The quote is the rare piece of cricket commentary that nobody is rushing to argue with.
"It puzzles me," Patil said. "Two greats, two legends, retire from the T20 format, but they are available to play the Indian Premier League (IPL). I don't understand… they could have played T20 cricket for India and figured in the IPL. That would be something we all would've accepted."
The contradiction nobody wants to litigate
Patil is not the first person to notice this, but he is the most senior. The standard defence goes that international T20 cricket is more physically demanding than the IPL, that it requires year-round availability and travel and the two players have done enough. Fine. But the bat does not know which tournament it is being swung in. If the body holds up for 14 IPL matches across April and May, the body holds up for an Asia Cup or a tri-series. The argument has always had a soft middle, and Patil has just pushed his thumb into it.
The IPL form supports him too. Rohit is averaging in the 40s for Mumbai. Kohli crossed 9,000 IPL runs this year. Whatever they decided they could not do for India in T20Is, they are visibly doing every week for Bengaluru and Mumbai.
Why this lands now
The timing matters. India have just retained the T20 World Cup with Sanju Samson winning Player of the Tournament. On the face of it, that suggests they were fine without their two retired greats and the question is closed. Patil's point reads differently to me. It is not that Suryakumar Yadav's side could not win without them. It is that the players themselves drew an arbitrary line, and the squad's depth was tested in ways it did not have to be.
Watch what happened in patches of the World Cup. The middle order looked thin against certain matchups. The dependence on Samson kept growing as the tournament wore on. India got there in the end, but the picture of an injured replacement opener walking out at the top of a chase was the price of two of the format's all-time leaders choosing to walk away while still 90 percent of what they were.
The selector's prerogative
Here is where the conversation gets interesting. Selectors do not get a vote on retirements. Players announce them and the selection meeting moves on. But the BCCI did have the option, somewhere between the 2024 World Cup and the 2026 tournament, to put the question back to both players formally and ask if a partial availability could be arranged. As far as anyone has reported, that conversation did not happen.
Patil's frustration is the frustration of a selector who has had to plug holes that the player could have filled, and was filling at his own franchise the whole time. It does not require accusing anyone of bad faith. It just notices the asymmetry and says it out loud. The IPL is a domestic tournament. The India shirt is the national one. Whichever side you are on, the order of priority that Patil is sketching is hard to argue against.
What happens from here
Practically, nothing. Kohli and Rohit are not coming back to T20Is. The 2026 World Cup is already won and the next one is the 2028 edition. By then Kohli will be nearly 40 and Rohit will be 41 and even Patil would probably concede the window has closed. The point of his quote is not to engineer a comeback. It is to put on record, while the season is still in front of everyone, that the two best India T20 batters of the modern era chose to step away from the shirt while continuing to monetise the format.
He is allowed to find that puzzling. Most of us probably do, even if we have not been polite enough to say so.
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