Rohit's batting shines spotlight on value of instinct and adaptability

The World Test Championship final last year was Rohit Sharma's 50th Test match. He was the fifth-most experienced member of India's top seven in that game.

The Dharamsala Test that ended on Saturday was Rohit's 59th Test, and India's top seven had undergone so much of a churn over those nine Tests that he was now its second-most experienced member. It included three players who hadn't played Test cricket before this series, and one who came in with just four previous caps.

For India, from a batting perspective, this series was all about the new and new-ish faces. Yashasvi Jaiswal became the first India batter since Sunil Gavaskar to score more than 700 runs in a series. Shubman Gill came of age. Sarfaraz Khan, Dhruv Jurel and Devdutt Padikkal made brilliant first impressions. Even the one debutant who didn't quite come off, Rajat Patidar, went through a run of luck wretched enough to be worth writing about.

With all that youthful energy around him, and with his harnessing of that energy as captain taking up its share of oxygen, it was inevitable that Rohit's batting would fly under the radar. But the series is done now, giving us space to reflect on his 400 runs - fourth in the series aggregates behind Jaiswal, Gill and Zak Crawley - at 44.44.

In a series played in mostly batting-friendly conditions, that average doesn't demand your attention. But, notably, he went at a strike rate of 64.20 - behind only Jaiswal and Sarfaraz among India's batters - and at 70.00 in the first ten overs of his innings. That's not as quick as Ben Duckett (81.10) in that phase, but quicker than both Crawley (68.72) and Jaiswal (63.09).

It wasn't the all-out aggression Rohit had adopted in the first powerplay during last year's ODI World Cup, but it wasn't too far from being its red-ball equivalent.

It said something about the situations India were in, and Rohit's instincts in those situations. Go back to India's failed chase of 231 in Hyderabad. There were times during that fourth innings when India's batters seemed to retreat into their shells, making little apparent effort to disturb the England spinners' lengths. According to ESPNcricinfo's data - caveat: there's some subjectivity to this, since it's the product of our scorers judging the length of each ball off TV, but it can be instructive - India's batters scored 28 runs off 172 good-length balls from the spinners during that chase, as against England's 175 off 306 in the third innings.

England's batters, led by Ollie Pope, had used the sweep and reverse-sweep frequently against good-length balls. Most of India's batters failed to come up with an equivalent response. The exception was Rohit, whose 58-ball 39 featured frequent forays down the pitch, sweeps, and back-to-back reverse-swept fours off Jack Leach.

This was Rohit's way right through the series. His response to India being 33 for 3 on the first morning in Rajkot was, likewise, to counterattack - on this occasion, luck was on his side and an edged slog off Tom Hartley, when he was on 27, was spilled by Joe Root at slip. He raced to his half-century in 71 balls and eventually made 131 off 196.

Dharamsala was perhaps the one time in this series when a long Rohit innings coincided with India establishing and extending a dominant position. It was, in some ways, his most straightforward innings, an outcome of spending time in good batting conditions and taking toll of an attack that wasn't particularly challenging. It allowed India fans to sit back and enjoy his batting without worrying about the match situation or conditions. You simply let the Rohit shots - and those from Gill at the other end - wash over you, particularly the ones he hit off Mark Wood: the early back-foot drive through cover point; the hooked six with fine leg, long leg and deep square leg in place; the back-away slap through mid-off when there was no one in front of square on the off side.

Before that, Ranchi presented India a fourth-innings chase as tricky as the one in Hyderabad, and Rohit set it up in much the same manner, using his feet constantly to minimise the risk of lbw, in the process messing with the lengths of England's spinners - this perhaps contributed to the slew of full-tosses they sent down. There were audacious shots against pace too, most memorably a pick-up shot for six over wide long-on off a good-length ball from James Anderson.

At one point, the audacity seemed to go to an almost unprecedented extreme, when Rohit took an off-stump guard against Hartley.

Right-hand batters often stand on off stump when they face offspinners or right-arm seamers bowling from over the wicket, to try and take lbw out of the equation. But it's almost unheard of for the off-stump guard to be used against left-arm spinners operating from around the wicket, because they can straighten the ball from a stump-to-stump line. Standing on off stump forces batters to play across the line to this sort of ball, greatly increasing their risk of dismissal. And yet, here Rohit was, daring Hartley to attack his pads and stumps.

It seemed to have the opposite effect on Hartley, though. Bowlers have two points of reference - the stumps and the batter - and Hartley's line appeared to shift in reaction to the batter's position. Rather than attack the stumps, he seemed to shift his line wider, taking lbw and bowled out of the equation on a pitch with low bounce.

Until he was stumped for 55, Rohit seemed to have pulled off a psychological masterclass against an inexperienced bowler. He revealed in his post-match press conference, however, that he had done no such thing. He said he hadn't even been aware he had been batting on off stump until he went back and watched footage of his innings. It's possible he had simply taken stance on a spot he must have marked for the offspinner Shoaib Bashir when Hartley bowled from the same end.

"I was not aware, honestly," Rohit said. "I was not aware of it until I went and saw the replay on the screen that I'm batting on off stump, because there was a lot of [foot]marks there, so I didn't want to bat on off stump.

"I wanted to stay a little leg-side [of the ball] and play the left-arm spinner, but against the offie I wanted to just try and move around a little bit in the crease, middle stump, off stump, try and just get him thinking a little bit as well."

If Rohit can make the viewer think he's pulling off a heist when he's simply being absentminded, it's because of the adaptability he's shown time and again in the past. His home record is as good as it is - his average of 61.58 is the best of all batters with at least 2000 Test runs in India - because he's found a range of methods for dealing with the various challenges home conditions can present. He trusted his defence and survived two fiery early spells from Kagiso Rabada on his way to 212 in Ranchi in 2019. He used the sweep and slog-sweep extensively when he made 161 against England in Chennai in 2021, but avoided those shots almost entirely when he made 120 against Australia last year in Nagpur.

This series presented Rohit with another diverse set of challenges, at a time when he was expected to carry one of the least experienced batting line-ups India have ever named. He came through them in a manner we have come to expect, but don't let that fool you into thinking what he did was routine.