It might still be early days, but this edition of the Indian Premier League is already fast becoming the Season of the 20-something left-handers.
Ahead of double-header Sunday (April 13), a 29-year-old from Trinidad & Tobago (Nicholas Pooran) helmed the run-making charts while a 20-year-old from Khost in Afghanistan (Noor Ahmad) wore the Purple Cap. Two of the three hundreds of Season 18 have come from the scything willows of 24-year-olds (Priyansh Arya and, famously on Saturday night, Abhishek Sharma), the third from a 26-year-old seasoned campaigner on the international comeback trail (Ishan Kishan). Left certainly has been overwhelmingly right.
Add to this flamboyant bunch – and make no mistake, this is a largely flamboyant bunch of batters to whom hitting sixes is second nature, complemented by a left-arm wrist-spinner who, even if he wanted to be, couldn’t be anything but flamboyant – a quiet, understated rangy 23-year-old left-hander from Chennai who cries out for attention not with flashy earrings and outlandish gestures but with the simplicity of his
strokeplay, at once effortless and breathtaking.
Answering to the name of B. Sai Sudharsan, the Gujarat Titans opener is engaged in a gripping battle with Pooran for the race to the Orange Cap. The symbol of supremacy when it comes to run-making in the IPL has changed hands more than once and is currently in the possession of the Caribbean charmer. But while the Orange Cap will be a welcome addition to his kitbag, Sudharsan’s primary focus is not on the slice of individual glory. The larger cause, team success, resonates with him; he was part of the squad (but not the XI) that won its maiden final on debut in 2022, top-scored with 96 in the last-ball loss to Chennai Super Kings in the title clash 12 months later and has been one of their more consistent performers in the last four seasons. Now armed with a maturity that goes well beyond his biological age, it sets him up as potentially one for the future from a leadership perspective too.
Nip and tuck
Pooran and Sudharsan have been engaged in a fabulous battle of nip-and-tuck in the race for top run-making honours. The far more explosive Trinidadian leads the way with 349 runs from six innings at an average and a strike-rate superior to Sudharsan. Where the latter averages 54.83 and strikes at 151.61 per 100 runs scored (he has 329 runs, also from six innings), Pooran’s corresponding numbers are 69.80 and 215.43 respectively. The older batter has smashed 31 sixes (just one fewer than Chennai Super Kings’ entire team tally at the conclusion of their sixth game) to Sudharsan’s 13 but then again, this isn’t a battle between
Pooran and Sudharsan, this isn’t a comparison of who is more valuable to their team.
For starters, Pooran strides out at No. 3, behind the aggressive opening pair of Mitchell Marsh and Aiden
Markram, with Lucknow Super Giants packing most of their explosive power in the top half of their batting order. New skipper Rishabh Pant has yet to catch fire but behind Pooran, there is no shortage of batting muscle – Ayush Badoni, David Miller, Abdul Samad. This is a fearsome group of ball-strikers in a tournament where every team, with the exception of CSK, seems to have assiduously assembled fearsome groups of ball-strikers.
Gujarat Titans aren’t an exception, by any stretch of the imagination. On paper, they might not appear to possess the same depth when it comes to scoring rapidly but of their six batters who have faced at least 30 balls this season, skipper Shubman Gill’s strike rate of 149.64 is the least. One would think that in a line-up that, Gill apart, boasts Jos Buttler, Sherfane Rutherford and Shahrukh Khan, Sudharsan would be the fulcrum around whom the rest would operate. But astonishingly, for want of a better word, it is the Tamil Nadu left-hander who tops the boundary-hitting charts for his franchise, with 31 fours and 13 sixes from 217 deliveries faced.
Sudharsan’s IPLcareer graph is the perfect illustration of how to marry consistency with authority, how to make the most of experience gained and situations encountered, how to keep growing better and better and finding novel methods of keeping oneself a step ahead of the opposition in these days of constant scrutiny and supreme dependence on data and analytics. Each edition of the IPL has been more fruitful numerically than the previous one – he is now in his fourth season – but more than the quantum of runs, it is the manner in which he has made them that has been impressive.
It is inevitable that batters will need to improvise – some might point to Virat Kohli, unfairly, and say that he is pretty much the poster boy for batting orthodoxly in 20-over cricket without any drop in returns or efficacy but the former Indian skipper can’t be the norm in any cricketing discussion — in the T20 format, and especially those who have cut their teeth bang in the middle of the 20-over revolution, unlike a Kohli. Sudarshan is nearly a decade and a half younger than Kohli and therefore is more of an offspring of the 20-over revolution than Kohli will ever be, but that doesn’t mean that he goes to the reverse sweep or the switch hit at the drop of a hat.
In Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s first home game of the season on April 2, Sai Sudharsan made a polished 49 at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium on April 2, one of the driving forces behind his team’s nonchalant assault on the hosts’ 169 for eight. During his time in the middle until he ceded centre-stage to Buttler and Rutherford, Sai Sudharsan lit up the venue with several wondrous strokes. There were muscular pulls and rasping square-cuts; his only six came when he walked across his stumps and paddled a full, fast ball from Josh Hazlewood to fine-leg for six. It was a terrific piece of improvisation, bold and adventurous and a grand example of the spectrum that traverses risk and reward. But the connoisseurs who watched that game at the ground and on television would have been delighted at Sudharsan’s choice of the stroke that had given him the greatest joy.
Subliminal effect
That came a ball after the six. Somewhat overcompensating for having bowled so full and on leg, Hazlewood pulled his length back and sent down a good delivery, potentially headed to the top of the off-stump. Sudharsan was prepared. An initial movement translated into a forward press and he punched the ball on the up past the Aussie quick, sending it racing off the pitch to the straight boundary with minimal effort and subliminal effect. It was a stroke that had ‘class’ written all over it, class that has been Sudharsan
ally for a long time now.
This season, Sudharsan has four half-centuries and the aforementioned 49 from six innings. If that’s not a sign of consistency, then little else is. Despite all this, he may not be even close to the fringes of the Indian T20 team, such is the depth that Ajit Agarkar and Suryakumar Yadav and Gautam Gambhir can pick from. The queue, especially within the batting community, to break into the T20 set-up is long, winding, seemingly endless. Sudharsan is smart enough to understand the futility of trying to second-guess the decision-makers, of the follies of attempting to figure out if he has done enough to catch and then hold their attention. In his head, that is not even his brief; that revolves around scoring runs of import and impact, of making runs that matter, that buttress the team’s cause rather than his own CV and runbank alone.
“It’s my fourth year (in the IPL and with GT), it has given me a lot of experience. I got exposed to a few difficult conditions, I got exposed to a lot of quick bowling in the nets. The most important thing which has helped my evolution or the way I’ve improved my T20 batting is the game time I get here and the practice time I get here with the Titans — with all quality bowlers, all international bowlers, Sudharsan acknowledged the other day.
“That has helped me even from the nets; I’ve learnt a lot in these three years. And obviously, playing for India, that has helped me even more to understand the game better and the basics of the game as well.” Sudharsan has played three One-Day Internationals, all in South Africa in December 2023, making half-centuries in his first two appearances. He didn’t bat in his only T20I, against Zimbabwe in Harare last July, but was in the India ‘A’ squad that travelled to Australia last hundred and produced a sparkling 103 in the second innings of the first unofficial ‘Test’ against the hosts in Mackay. Surprisingly for someone with such strong grounding in the basics, very good awareness of where his off-stump is and more than decent technique, he only averages 39.93 in 29 first-class games when he is clearly much, much better than those numbers would suggest.
India travel to England for five Tests, the first of them at Headingley from June 20, in the build-up to which the ‘A’ team will play two four-day games, starting in Canterbury on May 30.
Unless things go horribly wrong, Sai Sudharsan should be on the flight to the English capital sometime towards the third or so week of May, hoping to build on the gains of Australia and hoping to stay in the consciousness of the national selectors. India showed by plucking Devdutt Padikkal from the ‘A’ squad and fielding him in the XI in Perth Test ahead of reserve opener Abhimanyu Easwaran that they are prepared to look beyond the Bengal captain. Maybe in that lies Sudharsan’s chance to stake his claim. Quietly and without fuss, of course.
Published – April 14, 2025 12:29 am IST
