An evening of white-ball catharsis for Rohit Sharma

Rohit Sharma shook the Chinnaswamy crowd out of their sudden slumber with a cut shot off Azmatullah Omarzai on the first ball of the sixth over. You couldn't blame the crowd for letting their collective voices drop as Afghanistan sucked the air out of the stadium with four wickets in the first five overs. India's top-order fell apart, while their captain chased his first runs of the series.

Nerves were perhaps jangling, evident from the hilarious exchange between Rohit and umpire Virender Sharma caught on stump mic where the India captain jokingly chided him for awarding a leg bye for runs that had come off the outside edge of his bat in the first over. The width from Omarzai came as the opportune moment for Rohit to unburden himself and start having the sort of fun he is used to having while batting in white-ball cricket.

The Chinnaswamy surface, though, had a few tricks to play. In December, it chucked an