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On the opening ball of the sixth over, Rohit Sharma’s
cut shot off Azmatullah Omarzai startled the Chinnaswamy audience out of their
unexpected sleep. With four wickets in the first five overs, Afghanistan stole
the breath out of the stadium, so you couldn’t blame the audience for raising
their voices in unison. While their captain pursued his first runs of the
series, India’s top order collapsed.
The humorous interaction between India skipper Rohit
and umpire Virender Sharma, captured on stump mic, suggested that nerves were
probably jangling when the captain jokingly chastised him for giving a leg bye
for runs that had struck the outside edge of his bat in the opening over.
However, the Chinnaswamy surface was not without its
tricks. It gave Australia and India an uncanny sticky surface in December, but
on Wednesday it began as the bowlers’ ally once more. When he got the ball to
spin wildly away from Rohit in his opening over, leg spinner Qais Ahmad
experienced that firsthand. But in response, Rohit tried carefully thought-out
reverse sweeps. In a brief one-on-one match, Rohit seized on Ahmad’s attempt to
drag his length back a bit, rocking back and hitting a four between long on and
deep midwicket.
After the midway drink break, when Rohit Singh let
loose with pandemonium, India’s rebuilding process began anew with Rinku Singh.
He struck one six behind point and then again with more success in the next
over against Qais, proving his desire to execute the reverse hit against
left-arm spinner Sarafuddin Saifi. In the first white-ball match since the 2023
championship, in which he batted for more than two deliveries, Rohit displayed
the risk-reward style of play that would come to characterise both his career
and India’s performance in that major competition. Throughout the first two
hours of the match, he blatantly dispelled any questions about his usefulness
to the T20 team in a World Cup year.
As the last over of the innings drew near, Afghanistan
seemed to have capitulated to Rohit’s fancies, as he hit a fifty off 41 balls
with relative ease. Fuller deliveries were dealt with with minimal foot
movement, whereas anything that even vaguely resembled a short ball was
destroyed.
As is customary in the shorter games, Rohit changed
speeds at a dizzying rate to penalise the opposition for not getting rid of him
sooner. He achieved the three-figure milestone off the next 23 balls, becoming
the first batter to five in T20Is, after reaching 50 off 41.
This Wednesday evening and night, as he returned for
two Super Overs, represented a cathartic batting experience on what was India’s
final Twenty20 international match before the World Cup in June. The player
took a break from the game following the World Cup and acknowledged that he was
finding it difficult to move on from the heart-wrenching final defeat.