The evening breeze had arrived by the time Gujarat Titans filed out for practice at Mullanpur Stadium in New Chandigarh, offering brief respite from the Punjab heat. It was a pleasant enough evening for a training session, though nobody would have called the mood pleasant.
Two days ago, Royal Challengers Bengaluru had put 254 on the board in Dharamsala and defeated Gujarat by 92 runs, leaving them to make the long journey downhill to face a Rajasthan Royals side that is, at this moment, the tournament’s second-most terrifying prospect.
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi had just happened to 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 supposed to be difficult. The IPL had found its new protagonist, and it had found him at the precise age when most cricketers are still trying to earn a spot in their school’s first XI. Rajasthan Royals have camped in Mullanpur on a wave of noise and momentum, and Sooryavanshi was the reason.
Gujarat had work to do. They always do, somehow, and they always manage it. Four play-off appearances in five seasons since their inception is not an accident. It is a culture, built quietly, stubbornly, out of the spotlight, that tends to settle on louder franchises. And so, on the eve of Qualifier 2, they worked.
Ashish Nehra was at the edge of the square, shoes off, in the manner of a man utterly at ease with pressure. He sat with captain Shubman Gill for a lengthy discussion near the pitch — mapping fields, visualising lengths, making plans for batters they knew too well.
Gill had a near 30-minute net session, looking to attack everything, leaning into the more aggressive identity he has cultivated this season.
Nishant Sindhu, the 22-year-old entrusted with the pressure of batting at No. 4, was out there for 45 minutes against pace and spin, working on the problem the team have quietly carried all season: what happens if the top three fail?
Then came Shahrukh Khan, clearing the rope with the lusty confidence of a man swinging freely.
Yet, amidst the clanging of willow against leather, the leading run-scorer for Gujarat Titans was nowhere to be seen.
THE GHOST IN THE NETS
Sai Sudharsan, as those who cover Gujarat regularly will tell you, does not bat on matchday minus-one. Not as a rule handed down from the coaching staff, but as something he has arrived at himself, through years of understanding exactly what his mind and body need to perform. The nets had been going for three hours. The lights were blazing. His teammates had packed up and left. And then, with the ground to himself and no one watching, Sai walked out to the middle.
He had no bat in his hand.
The 24-year-old shadow batted alone, standing on the pitch, drives, pulls, even the late cut that had caused that extraordinary dismissal against RCB, where the bat flew from his grip and cannoned into the stumps even as the ball raced to the boundary. He worked through every shot with the deliberateness of a man solving a private equation. Then he walked to the other end, stood at the striker’s crease, and mapped out field settings in his head — imagining a bowler, imagining a field, choosing a response. No ball. No bowler. No fielders. Just him, the lights, and a conversation he was having entirely with himself.
It is, he has explained, mostly a mental exercise. Speaking in Delhi earlier this season, he was candid about where he puts his energy once a tournament is underway.
“Most of the part is mental preparation,” he said.
“Once the pre-season is over, it’s about having your mind sorted and organised. I do a lot of yoga, meditation and visualisation to keep myself mentally fit.”
The shadow batting, then, is not supplementary work. It is the work. The bat is almost beside the point.
THE MICROCOSM OF STYLE
The solo session was, in its way, a portrait of the batter. Sai Sudharsan does not hurt the ball. He finds boundaries. There is a distinction there that matters enormously to anyone who has watched him bat for any length of time. Where Sooryavanshi, the 15-year-old who will walk out to face Gujarat tomorrow, bludgeons the ball into submission, Sai guides it, times it, persuades it through gaps with the unhurried authority of a left-handed batter from a different era entirely. He is elegant. Old-school, even. The wrists are soft, the feet move early, and there is a patience to his strokeplay that feels almost anachronistic in a format that has decided patience is 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 powerplay like a personal grievance, who make the first six overs feel like a demolition derby. They are the format’s identity made flesh — pure, instinctive, impossible to look away from.
Sai Sudharsan, by contrast, is the kind of batter you appreciate more the longer you watch him. His value reveals itself over an innings, over a season, over a career. It does not announce itself in 29 balls.
ANCHOR IN THE AGE OF STEROIDS
The question, increasingly, is whether the IPL still has room for both. The format is on steroids now. Openers are expected to break powerplay records every other game. Six-hitting is not a skill so much as a baseline requirement. The Impact Player rule has pushed the game further toward the binary: go big, or go home. The anchor role that Virat Kohli and KL Rahul once advocated, and which Sai has evolved into something considerably faster, is increasingly treated not as a skill but as a limitation.
What Sai is doing is good. Gujarat know it. The question is whether the rest of the cricket world is still paying attention to that kind of good.
NUMBERS DON’T LIE
The numbers, laid out plainly, make the case for him. Since he began opening 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 as openers in that period — and Sai’s strike rate is better than both of them. This season alone, he has 652 runs in 15 matches, second on the overall run-scorers list, just 38 behind Sooryavanshi — the same Sooryavanshi who has spent the summer being spoken about as a once-in-a-generation talent. He averages 46.57 per innings.
MOST RUNS IN IPL 2026
And yet the India T20I conversation barely includes him. Yashasvi Jaiswal, who has scored 1,420 runs as an opener in the same period at a strike rate of 153, lower than Sai’s, it is worth noting, is spoken of in an entirely different breath. The difference lies not in the numbers but in the perception. In what T20 cricket has decided it values. In whether a batter who scores at 157 and averages 50 can be considered, by the format’s current standards, sufficiently thrilling.
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 contained Matthew Hayden, Michael Hussey, MS Dhoni and Suresh Raina — a constellation of generational talent, and still space for a man who contributed differently, quietly, without demanding the spotlight. That space feels like it is closing. The binary thinking that now governs the format — the sense that you either set stadiums alight or you are failing at T20 cricket — does not accommodate a batter like Sai easily. It does not know quite what to do with him.
Gujarat’s assistant coach Parthiv Patel, speaking before the Eliminator, was having none of it. There is no temptation, he said firmly, to ask Sai to go at a higher strike rate.
“He has been really effective. He has been scoring at a fair rate. If someone is scoring at 300, it doesn’t mean everyone has to strike at 300.”
It was the language of a coaching staff that understands the value of what it has — even when the wider world is too dazzled by pyrotechnics to notice.
THE STEADY EVOLUTION
Sai, for his part, is not standing still. He is acutely aware of the surrounding conversation, and characteristically, he has turned it into fuel.
“As the sport is evolving and T20 batting is getting greater and greater every season, even every five-six months if you can see,” he said in Delhi, “it’s very important for me to learn from it and be versatile enough to have that power game in my kitty and equip myself.”
His strike rate has climbed from 140 in his first season as an opener to consistently above 155 across the last two. He is not running in the same direction as everyone else. He has simply decided he does not need to.
The concern for Gujarat, if there is one, is specific. They have been set 200-plus three times this season and have not chased it down once. When the powerplay is expected to yield 60 or 70 runs, a batter who finds boundaries rather than manufacturing them can occasionally leave a team needing too much, too late. That is not an indictment of Sai. It is a description of the gap between what the IPL was and what it has become.
On Friday, in this same stadium, under these same lights, Sai Sudharsan will walk out to open the batting for Gujarat Titans in a knockout game. At the other end of the ground, at some point in the evening, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi will do the same for Rajasthan Royals. The cameras will follow Sooryavanshi. The highlight packages will be built around Sooryavanshi. If a 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, a 23-year-old left-hander from Chennai will be finding gaps, rotating strike, persuading the ball through covers with a wrist roll that takes years to develop and seconds to miss if you are not looking. He will not hurt the ball. He will not need to. He will find boundaries the way good batters always have — by reading the game earlier than everyone else and arriving at the answer before the question has fully formed.
The crowd will cheer louder for the 15-year-old. That is fine. That is, perhaps, as it should be. But back at Mullanpur, the night before, in the stillness after the stadium emptied, it was the Sai who stayed behind. The one without the bat. The one with the questions only he could hear.
He is at the top of the order, and at the top of the run-charts, and somewhere near the top of what this format is capable of producing from a left-handed bat who does not hurt the ball so much as understand it.
He just tends to stand there alone.
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