At the crease, Pandya irons out India’s problems
NEW DELHI: It is remarkable that Hardik Pandya, for whom several cases could be made to justify his reputation of being the finest T20 player in the game today, has never scored a fifty for India in T20 cricket. For his IPL employers and four-time champions Mumbai Indians, Pandya has struck four, including a 20-ball half-century in the season gone by. The lack of fifties in the nation’s blue could well be due to his batting position, low, and his role, finisher. But before Sunday, Pandya’s top score for India was an unbeaten 33. In 41 games, spread over five years.
Pandya didn’t add to his tally of fifties by the time the game in Sydney ended; but he certainly added to his mushrooming stature of being the gold standard in the format. To boot, he notched his career-best 42 not out, runs studded with breath-taking hits that helped India chase down 194 from a situation that was fast becoming improbable.
“I really like to see the scoreboard and play. It gives you clarity with your options and shots and which balls you can target,” the Man-of-the-Match would say later. “Because when you see 70 runs from 6 overs it feels [like] a lot. But if you break it down into 12 (runs per over), it does not seem so much.”
As the evening climaxed, India needed just that rate: 46 runs from the last four overs. This situation would get harder within a ball when captain Virat Kohli—who has leading the charge at this point with 40 runs—departed. As Kohli walked back, Pandya had 8 runs. From 6 balls. But he is programmed to believe that anything is possible. Speaking of his mindset at this point, Pandya said: “My game is built around the confidence I carry, to be honest. It’s on the fine line where it does not become over-confidence.”
All that confidence didn’t help, initially. When new batsman Shreyas Iyer called for two off the first ball of the 18th over— with India needing 37—Pandya refused and kept the strike. But the next two Adam Zampa deliveries produced just one Pandya run, and as if to prove his point, Iyer smacked a six and four from the next three balls. Then came the misses from his bat, two heavy swishes off Andrew Tye that struck little but air. After the second miss, 23 runs from 9 balls. But Pandya still believed: “From all my matches and my mistakes, I have realised that we have more time than we think in T20s.”
Sure. An edged four off Tye got Pandya’s belief pumping again, for only a confident man could slap the following ball through the narrowest gap at extra cover for four more. Still, India, or rather Pandya, needed 14 runs from the last over after he had pinched the strike. Australia’s stand-in captain Matthew Wade turned to the fiery Daniel Sams to put out the fire. But the faster Sams bowled, the bigger were Pandya’s hits. “I wanted to finish it early,” a happy man would say into the spider-camera immediately after completing the job. “Because I have played in games where even 6 runs needed off 3 balls, it can go to the wire. I don’t like that, so I was going to whack it anyway.”
An easy two, followed by a six into the old stands of the SCG and then a dot ball indeed brought the equation down to 6 runs from 3 balls. But as Pandya explained, he was in no mood to wait. The second six of the over stayed with the fans beyond cow corner and India won the series with a game to spare, recording their tenth consecutive T20I win. “It was a lot more fun till Hardik came out, to be honest with you,” Wade would later add about his maiden stint with leadership.
Pandya has now recorded his top scores in both formats India have played on this tour alone. When asked if, in Pandya’s current form, he was as good as they got, Kohli smiled.
“He’s hungry, so he’s going to get even better. Now he realises that this is his time. In the next 4-5 years he can really become that player to win you a game from anywhere.”