These days, in the IPL landscape, it has become difficult to differentiate between a highlights package and the entire game. In almost every match, there is a 15 or 20-ball fifty marked against a player’s name on the scoresheet. In such a scenario, the majority of the shots just go unnoticed. After all, when it is raining sixes, it is improbable to recall all of them. Amidst those hitting contests, Rajat Patidar’s six over cover and a pulled boundary would find a place in thousands of reels on Instagram and on YouTube shorts.
Oh! That six off Kagiso Rabada. At the nth moment, Patidar manufactured a hint of room, gave direction to the ball by adjusting his bat face and thumped it over covers. The reaction time was a fraction of a second. The express fast bowler also extracted a hint of bounce from a good length. Patidar, though, arguably played the shot of the tournament.
A few overs later, he crunched another superlative stroke off Prasidh Krishna. While facing an into-the-wicket short ball, Patidar stood tall and basically whip-pulled it for a boundary via fine leg. Mind you, this short ball got big on Patidar. Yet he nonchalantly swatted it like a fly. Granted that the high-altitude factor and relatively small dimensions of the Dharamshala ground worked in the favour of the batting tribe. But thousands of flowery words would be penned down on those two strokes.
So, how is Patidar able to essay strokes of such high pedigree? A few years ago, Patidar had said this to the writer. “I rely more on timing. I’m not a hard-hitter. I want the ball to come on to the bat. I always like to play cricketing shots, so I like facing fast bowling.”
Perhaps those who make their art look easy can’t quite describe their own methods. For them, it is merely an art of repeating the routine. Chandrakant Pandit, his coach at Madhya Pradesh, expanded it further to this correspondent. “I don’t want to compare him with anyone but if I have to take a name, Rohit Sharma has extra time with his batting.
“You can talk about Virat Kohli, Sachin Tendulkar, they had that little bit of extra time to pick the line and length. Rajat does too. To play the shot through the covers off the back foot, not everyone can manage it at that pace,” he had noted.
Incidentally, over the last decade or so, Patidar has made a habit of essaying jaw-dropping shots. Many moons ago, before he became a star in the glitzy world of IPL, Patidar took on the gauntlet of facing Mohammed Shami in a Vijay Hazare Trophy game and aced the test with eye-catching strokes.
The kind of shots that could inspire the writers to become expressionist painters and pen down a story with an array of colours. On an archetypal cold night in Dharamshala, his six over covers inspired none other than Virat Kohli, who had his eyes wide open while watching the spectacle in front of him.
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