‘Rohit Sharma resigned to the fact that maybe it’s just going to be white-ball cricket for him now,’ Karthik on Rohit’s long struggles in Tests

Veteran wicketkeeper-batter Dinesh Karthik feels that there were a lot of curve balls thrown at Rohit Sharma after his impressive debut in Test cricket against West Indies in 2013. The right-handed batter scored back-to-back Test centuries in the first two Tests.
However, he failed to carry forward the momentum, and in his first 25 Tests in more than a decade of international cricket, Rohit had added just one hundred to the two he had scored in his first two Tests.
With ODI double hundreds, T20I centuries, and leadership credentials burgeoning with every Indian Premier League title; Rohit had everything a modern white-ball cricketer could dream of, short of a 50-over World Cup title. But although he seemed to have made peace with his stop-start Test career, he hadn’t given up on the desire to wear the whites again.
“He has found answers to some, and he has not found answers to some. Rohit always believed that he had something to contribute to Test cricket. In the conversations that I have had, he always felt that maybe certain things didn’t go his way,” Karthik said in the docu-series Summer Stalemate on Cricbuzz.

“Sometimes, he played a reckless shot or two but he believed that he will come back. Interestingly, he didn’t come back at the speed that he would and he resigned to the fact that maybe it’s just going to be white-ball cricket for him now,” he added.
In 2013, with Sachin Tendulkar playing his last Test series, India handed Rohit Sharma his much-awaited debut in the game’s longest format against West Indies. The current India skipper grabbed the opportunity scoring 177 on his debut Test at Kolkata and followed it up with 111 in Mumbai, which was Sachin Tendulkar’s last Test match.
Karthik says how after his exploit in the first two Tests, he was seen as someone who was going to replace Sachin Tendulkar in India’s middle order in Test cricket.

“I don’t think there have been many who’ve had a start as successful as Rohit in Test cricket from an Indian point of view. In his first two matches, he got hundreds… and then everybody thought this is it – he is the big deal and the fact that Sachin is retiring from Test cricket, he is the one who is going to answer all those questions for us,”Karthik said.
“But life and sport as it turns out is never exactly what you think it is and there were a lot of curve balls thrown at Rohit over the period of time.”