When Pujara left 14-year-old Rohit tanned

'All I remember is that when I used to go to the ground, when I was 14-years-old, and when I came back in the evening, the colour of my face would be completely different.'

How to dismiss Cheteshwar Pujara? It was the million dollar question Rohit Sharma and his Mumbai teammates discussed the most in a huddle during their junior cricket days, as they knew the Saurashtra batter could ground them to the dust over two or three days of persistent batting.

Rohit reminisced that the wicket of Pujara was often the difference between a victory or defeat for his team in age-group matches, the early signs of the doughty batter who made 7,195 runs at 43.60 with 19 tons and 35 fifties from 103 Tests.

"I still remember, team meetings only revolved around him (on) how to get him out, and if we don't get him out, probably we'd lose the game,” Rohit said at the launch of Pujara's wife Puja's book The Diary of a Cricketer's Wife in Mumbai on Thursday.

The former India skipper quipped that his looks would change so much while fielding under the sun, after playing against Pujara, that even his mother would fret a bit.

“All I remember is that when I used to go to the ground, when I was 14-years-old, and when I came back in the evening, the colour of my face would be completely different,” he said.

“Because he used to bat all day and we used to field in the sun for (even) 2-3 days. I still remember that my mother asked me a couple of times that when you go to play from home, you look different and when you come home, after a week or 10 days, you look different.

“I would say, ‘mom, what do I do? There's a batsman by the name of Cheteshwar Pujara. He's been batting for three days'... so that is the first impression that we had of him,” Rohit added.

Rohit credited Pujara for playing more than 100 Tests after suffering ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) injuries to both his knees right at the start of his career.

“(It was) such a big injury (and) such a bad injury. Both his ACL were gone. For any cricketer, leave alone if you are not an athlete or not playing any sport, for a sportsman it's very, very tough if you lose both your ACL,” he said.

"We used to tease him about his running technique and all that but he managed to play more than 100 Test matches for India after that, a lot of credit goes to him for how he managed it. Great amount of dedication and passion he had to play the sport,” Rohit said.