Book excerpt: World Cup jeetna hai – Rohit Sharma’s unfulfilled quest as a cricketer

It was the end of February 2020, and the world hadn’t yet come to terms with the full fury of the Covid-19 virus. Travel in India hadn’t stopped and masks weren’t a feature of our lives just yet. It was India before corona. Rohit Sharma could still walk around in his hotel in Bengaluru posing for photographs with fans, and there was sanity all round. He wouldn’t have to sanitise hands following every handshake, and a hug was the norm and not an exception. In all this normal, however, there was something that wasn’t.

There was a degree of restlessness in Rohit, which we found out when we met him for a conversation close to the end of his rehab at the NCA on 25 February 2020. Rohit had hurt his hamstring in New Zealand that ended his tour even before he could play his first overseas Test as an opener. He was in red hot form in the white ball leg of the tour and just a few months earlier had scored five hundreds in the 2019 World Cup, the highest ever by any batsman in world cup history. To get injured yet again when in such form was terribly unfortunate.

It was…

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