You got to like Rahul Tripathi’s attitude. Why? The simple reason is that his batting is value for money.
In the all-important Qualifier 2 between Sunrisers Hyderabad and Rajasthan Royals in Chennai, the former’s score read 13 for 1. After tapping his helmet grille, out walked Tripathi to take guard. It took only three deliveries for Tripathi to hit the accelerator pedal as he tried to wrest back the initiative with a boundary off R Ashwin. His counterpart, however, has the required wisdom of experience to outsmart his opponent.
Incidentally, in the previous outing, Ashwin had got the better of the in-form Rajat Patidar. Expectedly, with Tripathi, too, Ashwin watched the feet of the batter in order to play a game of cat and mouse. This time around, Ashwin had to settle for being the second best, as Tripathi won the chess battle. He shuffled across towards off-stump, manufactured room and also steered one via third man to crack a volley of shots. Basically, he outmanoeuvred Ashwin’s plan to tuck him up for room.
When Tripathi fell for a rollicking 15-ball 37, SRH were scoring at a rate of around 12 an over. In the final analysis, SRH’s winning total of 175, in tricky conditions, was largely down to the efforts of Heinrich Klaasen and the unsung Tripathi. The aforementioned lines are the reason why Tripathi offers excellent value for his franchise.
Tripathi’s utility value isn’t just restricted to a solitary effort. In the Qualifier 1 clash between Kolkata Knight Riders and SRH, Mitchell Starc had reduced the opposition to 39 for 4. At that juncture, Tripathi compiled a much-needed 35-ball 55. More than the runs Tripathi aggregated, it was about the way he attacked a bowler on a rampage – He crunched three boundaries off his first 12 deliveries while facing Starc. Granted that one of the boundaries was via an edge, but he had made his intentions clear to Starc and KKR.
The subtext to Tripathi’s fifty was that he had struggled during the early part of the season. Tripathi could muster just 20 off 20 deliveries against KKR and that was followed by a laboured 11 off 18 in the PBKS-SRH game. During SRH’s next six matches, he had to cool his heels in the dug-out. Although he did regain some of his touch in the return fixture versus PBKS, there were question marks over Tripathi’s future before Qualifier 1.
Tripathi’s IPL career too is full of timely knocks of 30s and 40s. Even his highest individual score in IPL – 93 off only 52 deliveries – had powered Rising Pune Supergaint to a tense win over KKR with four balls to spare in IPL 2017. In fact, on that occasion, he had contributed almost 60 per cent of the side’s runs, and the next highest run-scorer for RPS was Ben Stokes with a mere 14 runs.
Coming back to SRH’s superlative performance versus RR and IPL 2024 in general, Pat Cummins is rightly getting all the applause for his impressive leadership skills. The likes of Abhishek Sharma, Travis Head, Klaasen, T Natarajan and Co. have also won fulsome praise for their fine showing at different times in the tournament. Amid all those splendid performances, Tripathi’s value-for-money shone through when SRH needed someone to soak up the pressure and perform in a couple of big games.