In Sooryavanshi's IPL, Sai Sudharsan bats on his own terms, undersung

By the time Gujarat Titans set out for practice at the Mullanpur Stadium in New Chandigarh, an evening breeze arrived, offering a brief respite from the Punjab heat. It was a pleasant enough evening for training, although one would not call the mood pleasant.

Two days ago, Royal Challengers Bengaluru put 254 on the board in Dharamsala beat Gujarat by 92 runs, leaving them with a long way to go down hill to face a Rajasthan Royals side which is the second most daunting prospect of the tournament at the moment.

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi just became SunRisers Hyderabad. 29 balls. 97 runs.

A 15-year-old from Bihar, playing T20 cricket the way most teenagers play video games, without fear, without memory, without apparent awareness that what he was doing was meant to be difficult. The IPL has found its new protagonist and it has found it at the exact age when most cricketers are still trying to get a place in their school’s first eleven. Rajasthan Royals camped in Mullanpur on a wave of buzz and momentum and Sooryavanshi was the reason.

Gujarat had work to do. They always do it somehow and always manage to do it. Four playoff appearances in the five seasons since their inception is no accident. It’s a culture built quietly, stubbornly, out of the limelight that tends to settle on louder franchises. And so on the eve of qualification 2 they worked.

Ashish Nehra was on the edge of the square, his shoes off, in the manner of a man perfectly comfortable with pressure. He sat down with skipper Shubman Gill for a long discussion near the pitch – mapping the field, visualizing lengths, making plans for shots they knew all too well. Coach Ashish Nehra and captain Shubman Gill on the eve of IPL Qualifier 2 (India Today Photo)

Gill had an almost 30-minute clean session, trying to attack everything, leaning on the more aggressive identity he has developed this season.

Nishant Sindhu, the 22-year-old handed the pressure of batting at No. 4, was there for 45 minutes against pace and spin, working on a problem the team has quietly carried all season: what happens when the top three fail?

Then came Shahrukh Khan, cleaning the rope with the lusty confidence of a man swinging freely.

Yet, amid the rattling of willow against leather, Gujarat Titans’ leading run-scorer was nowhere to be seen.

GHOST IN THE NETWORKS

Sai Sudharsan shadow batting at Mullanpur (India Today photo)

Sai Sudharsan, as those who cover Gujarat regularly will tell you, does not bat minus one on a match day. Not as a rule handed down from the coaching staff, but as something he’s learned over the years of understanding exactly what his mind and body need to perform. The networks had been up and running for three hours. The lights were on. His teammates packed up and left. And then, with the ground to himself and no one watching, Sai went into the middle.

He didn’t have a bat in his hand.

The 24-year-old shadow batted alone, stood on the field, drove, pulled, even the late cut that brought about that extraordinary dismissal against RCB where the bat flew out of his grip and shot into the stumps even as the ball hurtled towards the boundary. He worked through each shot with the poise of a man solving a private equation. Then he went to the other end, lined up at the hitter’s goal, and mapped out the pitch setup in his head – envisioning the bowler, envisioning the pitch, choosing a response. No ball. No pitcher. No players in field. Just him, the lights, and a conversation he was having all by himself.

It is, he explained, mostly a mental exercise. Speaking in Delhi earlier this season, he was candid about where he puts his energy when the tournament is on.

“Most of it is mental preparation,” he said.

“Once pre-season is over, it’s about getting my mind sorted and organised. I do a lot of yoga, meditation and visualization to keep myself mentally fit.”

So shadow blasting is not side work. It’s work. The bat is almost off.

A MICROCOSM OF STYLE

The solo session was in a way a portrait of the batsman. Sai Sudharsan did not hurt the ball. Finds boundaries. There is a difference that depends immensely on anyone who has watched him bat for how long. Where Sooryavanshi, the 15-year-old who faces Gujarat tomorrow, hits the ball into submission, Sai guides him, measures him, persuades him through the gaps with the unhurried authority of a left-handed batsman from an entirely different era. It is elegant. Even from the old school. The wrists are soft, the feet move early, and his move game has a patience that feels almost anachronistic in a format that decided patience was a character flaw.

Ask yourself, honestly, who puts more bums on seats. The answer is not Sai Sudharsan and it is not close. Sooryavanshi, Abhishek Sharma, Priyansh Arya – this IPL has produced a generation of openers who treat the power play as a personal grudge, making the first six overs feel like a demolition derby. They are the embodiment of the format’s identity – pure, instinctive, impossible to look away from.

Sai Sudharsan, on the other hand, is the kind of batter you appreciate the more you watch him. His value will show over the course of an inning, over the course of a season, over the course of a career. He does not report in 29 balls.

ANCHOR IN THE ERA OF STEROIDS

Increasingly, the question is whether the IPL still has room for both. The format is now on steroids. The openers are expected to break the powerplay records with every passing match. Six strikes isn’t so much a skill as a basic requirement. The Impact Player rule pushed the game further towards the binary: go or go home. The anchor role once championed by Virat Kohli and KL Rahul, and from which Sai has evolved into something considerably faster, is increasingly seen not as a skill but as a limitation.

What Sai is doing is good. Gujarat knows this. The question is whether the rest of the cricketing world still pays attention to this kind of goodness.

THE NUMBERS DON’T LIE

Clearly formulated numbers tell him. Since his launch in 2024, Sai has scored 1,580 runs in 33 matches at an average of 50 and a strike rate of 157. Only Shubman Gill and Virat Kohli have scored more runs as openers in that period – and Sai’s strike rate is better than both. With 652 runs in 15 matches this season alone, he is second in the all-time run-scorers list, just 38 behind Sooryavanshi – the same Sooryavanshi who was touted as a once-in-a-generation talent in the summer. He averages 46.57 per innings.

MOST RUNS IN IPL 2026

And yet the India T20I conversation barely includes him. Yashasvi Jaiswal, who scored 1,420 runs as an opener in the same period in 153 strikes, less than Sai, is worth noting, is spoken in a completely different breath. The difference is not in numbers, but in perception. What T20 cricket has decided it values. On whether a batsman who scores 157 and averages 50 can be considered exciting enough by the format’s current standards.

There was a time when the IPL had room for different kinds of excellence. Subramaniam Badrinath found his place in a Chennai Super Kings side that featured Matthew Hayden, Michael Hussey, MS Dhoni and Suresh Raina – a constellation of generational talent and still room for a man who contributed differently, quietly without demanding attention. The space seems to be closing. The binary thinking that now governs the format – the feeling that you either set stadiums on fire or fail in T20 cricket – does not sit well with a batsman like Sai. He doesn’t know what to do with him.

Speaking ahead of the Eliminator, Gujarat assistant coach Parthiv Patel was having none of it. There is no temptation, he said flatly, to ask Sai to raise the stakes.

“He was really efficient. He scored at a fair pace. If somebody scores 300, it doesn’t mean everybody has to strike 300.”

It was the language of a coaching staff that understands the value of what it has — even if the world is too dazzled by the pyrotechnics to notice.

CONSTANT EVOLUTION

Sai, for his part, doesn’t stand still. He is acutely aware of the surrounding conversation and characteristically turns it into fuel.

“With the way the sport is evolving and T20 batting is getting bigger and bigger every season, even every five to six months if you see,” he said in Delhi, “it’s very important that I learn from that and be versatile enough to have that power game in my kitty and arm myself.”

His strikeout rate went from 140 in the first season in the opening season to consistently over 155 in the last two. He doesn’t run in the same direction as everyone else. He just decided he didn’t need it.

Interest in Gujarat, if any, is specific. They have been over 200 three times this season and have never caught up. When the powerplay is expected to yield 60 or 70 runs, a batsman who finds boundaries instead of making them can sometimes leave a team needing too much, too late. That’s not Sai’s indictment. It is a description of the gap between what the IPL was and what it has become.

On Friday at the same stadium under the same lights, Sai Sudharsan will come out to open the batting for Gujarat Titans in the knockout game. At the other end of the country, sometime in the evening, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi will do the same for Rajasthan Royals. Cameras will follow Sooryavanshi. The most important packages will be built around Sooryavanshi. If the 15-year-old from Bihar hits three sixes in an over, the internet will know about it within minutes.

And somewhere in the same innings, the 23-year-old left-hander from Chennai will be finding gaps, rotating the strike, convincing the ball through covers with a wrist roll that takes years to develop and seconds that fly by if you’re not looking. That ball won’t hurt. He won’t need to. He finds boundaries the way good batsmen always do – by reading the game before everyone else and arriving at the answer before the question is fully formed.

The crowd will cheer louder for the 15-year-old. That’s okay. That’s how it should be. But back in Mullanpur, the night before, in the silence after the stadium emptied, it was Sai who stayed behind. The one without the bat. The one with the questions only he could hear.

He’s at the top of the order and at the top of the batting average and somewhere near the top of what this format is capable of producing from a left-handed bat who doesn’t hurt the ball but understands it.

He tends to stand there alone.

– The end

Issued by:

Akshay Ramesh

Published on:

29 May 2026 06:15 IST