India captain Rohit Sharma says it was hard to move on following the World Cup final defeat to Australia.
Sharma’s men had swept all before them, winning each of their 10 games, only to come unstuck in the final against a Travis Head-inspired Australia. Head smashed a brilliant 137 as Australia won by six wickets.
Since that point, Sharma has disappeared from public life but re-emerged on Wednesday to concede he had found the aftermath difficult to cope with.
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Speaking on a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, he said: “It wasn’t easy to digest, but life moves on. You have to move on in life. But, honestly, it was tough. It was not so easy to just move on.
“I have always grown up watching 50-over World Cup, and to me, that was the ultimate prize. We have worked all these years for that World Cup, and it is disappointing? If you don’t get through it, and you don’t get what you want, what you’ve been looking for all this while, what you were dreaming of, you get disappointed, and you get frustrated as well at times.”
Sharma, who is sitting out the white-ball leg of the ongoing tour of South Africa but will return for the Test series, was proud of what his team achieved, however.
“I thought we did everything we could from our side,” he added.
“If someone asks me, what went wrong…because we won 10 games, and in those 10 games, yes, we made mistakes, but that mistakes happen in every game that you play. You cannot have a perfect game. You can have a near-perfect game. But you cannot have a perfect game.
“If I look on the other side of it, I’m really proud of the team as well. Because how we played was simply outstanding. You don’t get to perform like that every World Cup.”
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Despite the heartbreaking defeat, Sharma has been encouraged by the support he has received and is now more determined than ever to give the Indian fans success.
He said: “For me to see people coming up to me, telling me that they were proud of the team made me feel really good to a certain extent.
“And along with them, I was healing as well. I felt, okay these are the kind of things you want to hear. When you meet people, when they understand what the player must be going through and when they know these kind of things, and not to bring out that frustration, that anger, it means a lot for us.
“It was just pure love from people that I met and it was wonderful to see that. So it gives you motivation to get back and start working again and look for another ultimate prize.”
