Indian captain Rohit Sharma is reportedly planning to prolong his career till the 2027 ODI World Cup in South Africa and doesn’t want to give up playing Test cricket either. According to Cricbuzz, he has already devised a plan to work on his fitness and batting, with the help of current men’s senior assistant coach Abhishek Nayar, to sustain the standard required in international cricket. The report said that a lot of decisions on his future will depend on his performance in the upcoming IPL 2025. Nayar, Rohit’s former Mumbai teammate, has worked with a ton of India cricketers, including KL Rahul and Dinesh Karthik to help them unlock new aspects of their games. Rohit has also credited him before for his success. He’s renowned as someone with the knowledge of maximising players’ potential in modern cricket. There was a ton of speculation about his future in international cricket before the 2025 Champions Trophy. He’s 37 and had already retired from T20Is after last year’s T20 World Cup. Moreover, he had dropped himself from the final Test of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, accepting that his performances hadn’t been good enough. Not many cricketers play World Cups when they are 40 — the age Rohit would be in 2027. However, the storylines changed when India registered a thrilling winning over New Zealand in the final and Rohit was declared the Player of the Match for his knock of 76. He also became only the second Indian captain to win two ICC titles. In the post-match press conference, he emphatically declared that he wasn’t going anywhere from the format, and was also heard confirming the same to Virat Kohli in an impromptu conversation in the heat of India’s celebrations after the final win. “One more thing. I’m not going to retire from this format, just to make sure that no rumors are spread moving forward,” he said. In further interviews, he mentioned that he didn’t want to ‘draw lines’ on whether he’d play the 2027 World Cup and was keeping all his ‘options open’. Earlier in the day, former Australia captain Ricky Ponting had also judged the statement as a sign that Rohit feels he has ‘unfinished business’ in ODIs and wants to push himself as much as possible. “I think probably the fact that they lost the last one and he was captain, that might be the thing that’s playing on the back of his mind,” Ponting was quoted as saying in The ICC Review. “Just have one more crack at trying to win the T20 World Cup, the Champions Trophy, and the ODI World Cup. I mean when you see him play like he played in the Champions Trophy final, you wouldn’t say that his time is up just yet.”