When Sai Sudharsan walked into bat this evening at 67-1 after MS Dhoni’s lightening glove work stopped Shubman Gill from potentially racing to his fourth ton of this IPL, I told my son that the Gujarat Titans had missed a trick by not sending Vijay Shankar up the order tonight.
My statement was based on the fact that three nights ago, Sai decided to “retire” himself out because he couldn’t step on the gas in the final overs. He was only the 14th player in the history of the IPL to do so. He was scoring a decent strike-rate of 138.7, but his mates, Gill, Hardik Pandya and Rashid Khan, were tonking the ball at over 215!
In fact, in the 12 previous games that he had played in the IPL, his quickest was a 14-ball 20 at a strike rate of 143 against RCB, and his personal best was 65 against Punjab Kings, both in 2022. In a batting line-up packed with power-hitters like Gill, Wriddhiman Saha, Pandya, Shankar, Rashid, David Miller and Rahul Tewatia, it must have been tough to be Sai Sudharsan. But not after tonight.
Sudharsan started tentatively with just 6 off 9, further vindicating my initial stance. But in the next 38 balls, he rocketed his way to 96 with six sixes and eight fours. He not only announced his arrival and repaid the faith that Pandya, his skipper, had shown in him by backing him to the hilt despite some below-par performances in the recent past.
In a recent interview, Pandya had shared that there were two kinds of teams that he had seen – one like the Mumbai Indians squad circa 2015-2020 that was packed with superstars, and the other like CSK under Dhoni, that created an environment that brought out superstar performances from even out-of-form or par cricketers.
He claimed that he wanted to emulate the latter, and Sudharsan’s performance tonight and Pandya’s hugs and smiles as non-striker indicated that he might getting good at providing that atmosphere for his unit.
Right from his younger days, the gritty Sudharsan has been used to playing second fiddle in the shadow of seniors such as Ganga Sridhar Raju or Hari Nishaanth, who had outscored Sudharsan by just 10 runs in the Tamil Nadu Premier League (TNPL) in 2021.
Even in his Under-14 days, he finished as the fourth-best batsman in the tournament for South Zone, with four fifties from five matches, but a certain Tilak Varma stole the limelight as the top run-scorer for the south.
Sudharsan, a determined left-hand bat – whose mother was a state volleyball player and whose father represented the nation as a sprinter and long jumper at the South Asian Federation Games – persisted with the game and continued to pile on the runs in the Vijay Merchant and Vinoo Mankad trophies, included a couple of innings of 102 not out against Jharkhand and Vidarbha. Those accelerated his path to the U-19 Challenger Trophy.
His has been a story of struggle, and finding a way.
After a tough 2019-2020, he made the most of the TNPL platform and across two seasons, he went on to score 594 runs at an average of nearly 60 and at a strike-rate of 138.7. He helped Lyca Kovai Kings, his franchise, to win the title in 2022.
That success fast-tracked his journey into first-class cricket, and he made the most of his debut when he delivered a man of the match performance for Tamil Nadu against Hyderabad by scoring 179 and 42. In the seven matches that he has played for his state thus far, he has scored a couple of tons and a fifty and averages a healthy 47.66.
Sudharsan has a long way to go, and will be well aware of the depth of the talent pool in Indian cricket. Left-hand bats like Yashasvi Jaiswal and Varma are already in the selectors’ thoughts, and Sudharsan will need to continue to score and score big when it matters most.
On Monday night, he did just that, batting opposite his supportive skipper. Against the franchise representing his home city, and in front of the legendary Dhoni, who would have had an unenviable view to watch some of the towering sixes that Sudharsan struck, with thousands looking on inside a packed Narendra Modi Stadium and over 3 crore concurrent viewers on Jio Cinema.
He helped his team register the highest score in an IPL final, and he did it in a manner that anyone would now think twice before criticising his strike-rate or ability to hit big.
His 96 off 47 balls was the third-highest individual score in an IPL final, after Shane Watson’s 117 (2018) and Saha’s 115 (2014), and the biggest by an uncapped player. The 16 editions of the IPL have seen many a one or two-season wonder, including Manish Pandey and Manvinder Bisla.
Pandey made 94 for Kolkata Knight Riders in the 2014 final to eclipse Saha’s century for Kings XI Punjab, and while Bisla’s 89 for the same team helped upset the might CSK in the 2012 final. But neither could really capitalise on those moments under the floodlights.
Let’s hope for Sudharsan’s sake that his career trajectory turns out to be very different, and that Monday night was just the first big step on the journey to an India cap and so much more.