Donning SRH’s orange and black for the first time, Ishan Kishan fit right in ©BCCI/IPL Back in November 2024, Ishan Kishan reached for his phone the moment Sunrisers Hyderabad secured his services in the mega auction. He dialled Abhishek Sharma’s number and the conversation went like this: Kishan: What are you guys expecting, do I have to come and hit each and every ball? Abhishek: On point, yeah, that is your job! Timing can sometimes be everything in this sport, beyond its on-field definition of how well the bat meets the ball. SRH pined for Kishan long before the recent auction. Before the 2022 season, the start of the previous cycle, they went till 15 crore and retreated as Mumbai Indians raised the paddle for 15.25 Cr to make him the most expensive buy of that season. If MI hadn’t done it back then, the call to Abhishek would’ve gone very differently. The opener was yet to have his breakout season and SRH were miles away from piecing together their batting brutality blueprint. In his eventual arrival onto the ground in SRH attire, with a noisy partisan crowd in Hyderabad baying for sixes in the early evening of a Sunday, timing was on his side. On the third ball he faced, he hit a four over the bowler Maheesh Theekshana’s head to start looking the part in the most explosive top-order of the league. He had his good friend Abhishek’s short but effective batting reel to take a cue from as the opener walked back for a 11-ball 24, while Travis Head gave him a live demo of the batting devastation that SRH religiously swore by, particularly on the flat decks at home. The burning question after the risky highs of 2024 was whether SRH could truly keep up in times when even the smallest pattern resembling a weakness can be enlarged and exploited from behind a screen. In SRH’s bid to answer that question in an overwhelming affirmative, Kishan fit right in. Theekshana, who’d broken the opening stand, bowled his third in the PowerPlay with the idea of pushing back against the hosts, but Kishan avoided the traps laid out for him. Theekshana’s choice of weapon was to go slightly shorter, inviting Kishan to cut against the three-man off-side ring. Kishan hit gaps and over them to join in on the idea of pushing the limits of maximising the PowerPlay – taking SRH to 94/1. The end of the PowerPlay came as a relief for Riyan Parag, who struggled to cope with the relentlessness of SRH’s stroke-making with only two men in the deep. But even with spread out fields, there was more suffering to come at the hands of Kishan. Sandeep Sharma directed his effective wide slower bouncer at the left-hander with a deep point stationed for a catch, only for the latter to beat the man with his upper cut. Kishan also made a sizeable contribution to Jofra Archer’s figures of 1/79 – the worst-ever in IPL history, accessing different parts of the ground for his sixes. He moved a touch across to pull one over fine leg and then made room outside the leg stump on the very next ball to deposit it deep into the stands over cover to get his 25-ball fifty. Kishan celebrated by gesturing to his family in the stands, and then went back to channeling his aggression towards the next bowler in line – Fazalhaq Farooqi. RR bowlers attempted to bowl slower into the pitch and aimed for wide yorkers to force Kishan to target the longer square boundaries. But once again, SRH’s new No.3 didn’t step on the landmines ahead of him. He waited, kept his shape and still found empty areas to target, enroute a 45-ball century – his first-ever in the IPL. The opportunity to fearlessly hit through the line was two-fold for Kishan. First, a straight out flat pitch at home that allowed SRH to shape their batting ethos, and second a leadership group that encouraged him to do it without any repercussions attached to the outcome. “It’s not that I got 100 and I am talking about it, but yeah, when I got here, the message was very clear. If the ball is there, just go for it, have your fun, have your moment.” After a tough phase of 18-odd months where he lost his BCCI central contract and an India team spot in all three formats, Kishan gladly did as he was told. ShareTweet
