NEW DELHI: India’s ODI captain Rohit Sharma’s journey to becoming one of modern cricket’s most destructive openers almost took a very different path. His childhood coach, Dinesh Lad, has revealed that he first spotted Rohit not with a bat in hand, but as a promising off-spinner — and only discovered his batting talent by chance, much later.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!Speaking on a YouTube podcast with Gaurav Manglani, Lad recalled: “I first saw him as a bowler, he was about 12 years old. I saw him playing a match against us. Then I told his uncle (Chacha) to get him admitted to my school. The school started in 1995, and I saw Rohit in 1999. He took admission that year. In the first year, he was in under 14. During practice, I kept making him bowl. Next year, Rohit went to 8th standard and was 14 years old.”

The turning point came unexpectedly. “One day, while entering the school, I saw a boy knocking (batting). From outside, I saw the bat was coming very straight and good. I didn’t know it was Rohit at first. When I went inside, I asked him if he was batting. He said yes, sir. Then I gave him some batting in the nets at number six or seven. Before that, I had never given him batting practice. That was my mistake,” Lad admitted.Rohit soon proved his worth with the bat. “He batted well. In a match, he went in at number seven and scored 40 runs — a very good 40. The way he was batting, I felt he had a very good talent for batting. A thought came to my mind: it would be good to make him open. He was very happy when I asked, and scored 140 runs as an opener. That’s when I knew he should focus more on batting.”The rest, as they say, is history — with Rohit Sharma going on to become one of the finest opening batters of his era, famed for his elegance, timing, and unmatched pull shot.