Rohit Sharma's Comfort Food: Banana Wafers During Test Cricket
On the surface, Rohit Sharma always looked unflappable in whites. Heavy bat, soft hands, that unhurried stride to the crease. But behind the calm, India’s former Test captain fought long, restless nights — and found comfort in something as simple as his mother’s banana wafers.
The opener, who ended his Test career in 2023 with 4,301 runs in 67 matches at an average of 40.57, spoke candidly about those nights on his television show, Family Full House with Rohit Sharma. Test cricket, his favourite format, did not let him sleep easily.
“Yes, I did feel it. I won’t lie,” he said, recalling the nervous churn that came with the longest format. He admitted that whenever he played a Test, the anxiety sat deep inside. The format, he said, brought its own challenges and never felt easy, no matter how experienced he became.
The pressure would follow him back to the hotel. The lights went out, the match paused, but his mind kept playing deliveries on loop.
He stayed awake. A lot.
Rohit described how that nervous energy turned into late-night hunger. If you’re up, you want to eat. Simple as that. So he made sure he always carried one thing with him during Test series: his comfort food, packed with care at home.
Banana wafers. His mother’s banana wafers.
They weren’t the usual oily, deep-fried chips that cricketers often avoid in the name of fitness. There was a twist. “They weren’t fried,” he said. His mother had her own method — she baked them. That made them lighter, but for Rohit, the real weight they carried was emotional.
He would tuck them into his bag before leaving home, knowing that somewhere between team meetings, nets, and long days in the field, there would be a night when the nerves wouldn’t let him sleep. On those nights, the game felt bigger, the silence louder, and the next day’s first ball a little too close for comfort.
That’s when the wafers came out.
He could be in New Delhi, Melbourne, or Lord’s. It didn’t matter. One handful of those baked slices of banana, and he was back in his living room in Mumbai, a kid again, away from the noise and the numbers and the expectations that cling to an India captain.
For a batter who spent more than a decade wrestling with the mental and physical grind of Test cricket — 12 centuries, 18 fifties, a highest score of 212 — the ritual stayed disarmingly modest. No elaborate diet secrets. No exotic recovery plans. Just a homemade snack, baked in a familiar kitchen, bridging the gap between the harsh glare of international cricket and the quiet of home.
The scorecards will remember the runs. The averages, the hundreds, the milestones. The sleepless nights and the banana wafers will live somewhere else — in the private, human side of a career played out under relentless scrutiny, and in the small, telling detail of a great player who still needed his mother’s touch to get through the toughest format of them all.
