Rohit Sharma breaks an unwanted 63-year-old record in the 1st Test vs South Africa

The caravan of the South African tour of India will roll on. The next stop will be the M.C.A Stadium in Pune where the second Test match will be played. Faf du Plessis men were walloped by a whopping margin of 203 runs and at the heart of that beating was Rohit Sharma’s multiple record-breaking heists.

The Indian white-ball vice-captain and one of the modern-day greats in the shorter formats of the game, Sharma started his tryst with opening the batting in Test match cricket with a hundred in each innings of the 1st Test in Visakhapatnam. Sharma became only the sixth Indian batsman- a list spearheaded by Sunil Gavaskar thrice- to score a hundred in each innings of a Test match and also the first-ever opener to score in excess of 300 runs in his maiden innings for the said position.

We saw different facets of Rohit’s batting in the 1st Test. While he ably negotiated the opening burst from Kagiso Rabada and Vernon Philander, once he got set, we were to see the glimpses of Rohit Sharma- The Hitman. In another ridiculous display of hitting, Sharma lofted 13 sixes [6 in the first followed by 7 in the second] into the stands to etch himself into the record books as the batsmen with most number of sixes in a single Test, piping Wasim Akram’s previous record of 12 which the left-hander hit against Zimbabwe during his 257 at Sheikhpura in 1996.

63 years old record broken by Rohit

But, as they say, “You live by the sword, you die by it!” Which is exactly what happened with Rohit. In a bid to continue his assault, Sharma went on to get stumped in both innings against the same bowler: Keshav Maharaj. Ironically, this is the first time that Rohit was stumped in his first-class career, and the fact that it happened twice in a single Test, it made him the first opener since Bert Sutcliffe in 1956 to achieve the unwanted record. Bert Sutcliffe

Sharma also became the first Indian batsman to be out stumped in each innings of a Test match. Rohit wouldn’t be much bothered though. For, by the time he was stumped, he had already inflicted a lot of damage on the opposition and registered his name in multiple record books.

Watch: Sreesanth’s IPL controversy timeline