They say a man's true colors show in adversity. I think the batting collapse during the 5th ODI counts as adversity enough to analyze Rohit Sharma's effort. On the face of it, Rohit Sharma top scored and made nearly a third of the teams runs. He batted till the very end and was only stopped when he ran out of partners at the other end. Good show?
A deeper analysis of the inning reveals a different story. When he first came in, India were 65/2 after a characteristic blazing start from Virender Sehwag. The situation called for Rohit to rotate the strike and keep the dangerous Sehwag on strike. The New Zealand team were already rattled by Sehwag and had dropped three catches. Instead, he hogged the strike for 10 balls straight scoring 2 runs. This frustrated Sehwag and he threw his wicket away when he got back on strike.
With two new men at the crease Rohit now had to forge a partnership with Yuvraj Singh. Yet he managed only 7 runs of the 18 balls he faced in this period and looked completely at sea. He couldn't rotate the strike and he couldn't beat the field during the bowling powerplay that was taken at the fall of Sehwag. Even the commentators could tell that Rohits slow play led to extra pressure on the batsmen at the other end. Dhoni failed to soak up this extra pressure too.
Pretty soon Rohit was playing with the tail. Common sense would dictate that he farm the strike and look to face the majority of the deliveries. Instead he now tried to rotate the strike. He exposed the lesser batsmen and didn't seem to want to get back to the batting end. Instead he ran out both tailenders who could support him. He also failed to take the batting powerplay before more wickets fell and batted the bulk of them with the number 10, Praveen Kumar.
Rohit continued to take singles and leave the onus of run scoring, even in the batting powerplay, on numbers 10 and 11. He failed to hit a single boundary after Zaheer Khan's wicket. In fact in his entire inning he reached the boundary only twice.
Despite his talent and abilities he completely failed to read the requirements at any stage of the game. This debacle should see him out of the team to get more experience at the domestic circuit. Till he proves otherwise, I am going to dub him "Batsman of very little brain".