Rohit Sharma's Journey Through Test Cricket and Homemade Comfort

Rohit Sharma spent more than a decade living inside the unforgiving bubble of Test cricket. The pressure, the scrutiny, the weight of a format he openly calls his favourite – it all followed him back to the hotel room long after stumps. Sleep, often, did not.

So he turned to something disarmingly simple: his mother’s homemade banana wafers.

On his television show, ‘Family Full House with Rohit Sharma’, the former India captain peeled back a quieter, more vulnerable layer of his Test career. Not the hundreds, not the captaincy, not the trophies. The nights.

“Yes, I did feel it. I won’t lie,” he said, speaking about the anxiety that wrapped itself around him during Test matches. Across 67 Tests between 2013 and 2024, as he built a record of 4,301 runs at an average of 40.57 with 12 centuries and 18 fifties, the mental toll rarely eased. “Whenever I played a Test match, there was a lot of nervousness inside. Especially during Tests, because this was my favourite format.”

Test cricket asks for everything. Technique, patience, courage. It also asks you to sit alone with your thoughts when the day’s play is done.

“Playing Test cricket is not an easy format. No format is easy, but Test matches have their own different challenges,” he said. That cocktail of expectation and self-doubt would leave him wired. “For Tests I was always nervous and in that nervousness I couldn’t sleep, so I used to stay awake the whole night.”

And when you’re awake, the mind wanders. So does the appetite.

“You’re awake and you feel like eating something,” he admitted. That’s where the wafers came in – not the greasy, store-bought variety, but a carefully prepared slice of home. “So I always kept my comfort food with me, which my mother always made for me. That was banana wafers.”

They weren’t even fried.

“There was no frying. My mother had her own methods – she used to bake them,” Rohit said. A small detail, but it carried the warmth of a home kitchen into impersonal hotel rooms across the cricketing world. “I always used to carry them with me. Whenever I felt like it, I would eat them.”

For a batter who rose from middle-order hopeful to prolific opener, then to India’s Test captain before calling time on his red-ball career last year, those baked banana wafers became more than a snack. They were a quiet ritual, a reminder of where he came from, as he faced the hardest format the game has to offer.

His highest Test score, 212, sits on the record books. The late-night nerves and the homemade wafers will never appear on a scoreboard. But they tell you just as much about what it took for Rohit Sharma to live his favourite format, one sleepless night at a time.