South Africa v India 2018: Five of the biggest flops of the tour

India’s tour of South Africa this year was quite an exciting and entertaining one. India went to South Africa with possibly one of the best teams that they have ever boasted of. The side was well-balanced with a mixture of youth and experienced and was considered the strongest side that ever toured the Rainbow Nation. However, things didn’t pan out the way India wanted early in the tour. They lost the first two Tests quite embarrassingly drawing severe criticism.

But it was only during the third Test that they found the right momentum and carried on from there. They lost only two games after that in the limited-overs format exhibiting their dominance. They won both the ODI series and the T20I series by a margin of 5-1 and 2-1 respectively, giving the fans a lot to cheer for. South Africa never seemed to have got into the groove after the third Test loss and was also marred by injuries.

Although there were some brilliant performances both sides, there were quite a few players who had let their team down. They failed to reach the expectations and were a severe disappointment for the fans.

Here is a look at the five flops of the series:

1. Rohit Sharma

Rohit Sharma was in sublime form ahead of the Proteas tour. He was almost on par with Virat Kohli in the limited overs format and was scoring runs across formats. Furthermore, he hit a brilliant century in a T20I game against Srilanka just ahead of this tour. Given his brilliant run across formats, fans expected him to excel and correct his poor record on the South African soil.

However, that wasn’t to be the case and Sharma made his records even worse. Although he had a century to his name, there was nothing else to complement it. He had some of the worst numbers and probably the worst tour for him on the personal front in the last two years. Rohit only managed to score 280 runs across the formats in the 13 innings he played at an average of 21.5 leading to great disappointment.