For a little while, it appeared as though Suryakumar Yadav would successfully complete a T20 match without making the jaw-dropping shot.
Then he made the most amazing six-hole swing. It enabled him to score his first IPL century and helped Mumbai Indians defeat Gujarat Titans, the defending champions, with ease.
Are you aware of the third man dabs Kane Williamson uses to score singles? Suryakumar entered the same space, however he did so after crossing the boundary. He just caught sight of a ball off-stump.
He was confident that he could crawl under it. He opened the face at the moment of impact, just like Williamson does, and then the strength in his forearms and wrists took care of the rest.
Suryakumar here. Nobody else views T20 cricket the way he does.
The Titans knew that a victory would give them two chances to advance to the championship game in addition to guaranteeing them a position in the playoffs.
To make it happen, they turned to their main man. In a format that is still unfair to his sort, Rashid Khan produced four wickets for 30 runs.
Even today, Suryakumar used 49 balls to demonstrate that bowlers and their strategies are only in place so that batsmen may enter the game and rip them to pieces.
Rashid Khan, however, would reject that. He grabbed Rohit Sharma at slip with an exquisite leg break. He defeated Ishan Kishan with a straightforward length adjustment after the deliberate sweep shot failed to connect with a ball that was too full for it.
Rashid’s final six balls were saved by the Titans for their match against Tim David. Those are serious issues. The 17th over was made. At this point, David starts to move. But he was unable to do so since Rashid had taken him out for 5 off 3.
Few people have this kind of capacity for manufacturing wickets as needed. Even fewer are capable of doing so when the opponent attacks them ferociously.
When Mumbai lost their third wicket in the ninth over, they had been scoring only one run per ball for a time. 15 off 15. And then all of a sudden, 32 in 10 crashed.
At this point, Vishnu Vinod, a Kerala wicketkeeper making his debut in Mumbai, hit Mohammed Shami for a hardly conceivable six. He had quick hands and wicket wrists, which let him scythe over point a ball that ended up on top of the off stump.
Unless SKY did SKY things, that would have been the game-winning shot.
For his fifty, he needed 32 balls. By his standards, that was sluggish, and he had been batting conventionally all innings.
The one indulgence he allowed himself were those straight sixes, where he typically stands with his weight on the back foot up until the moment where he meets the ball, and then he leaps, lifting the ball and himself off the ground. He gains advantage by doing it. He has a certain way of doing it.
After Rashid led David outside, a crisis occurred. At the beginning of the 18th over, Suryakumar was 53 off 34. To go to 73 off 40, he smacked Mohit Sharma for three fours and a six.
In the 19th over, he faced Mohammed Shami, and by simply opening the bat face, he played a front-foot drive for six over third man.
On 97, with one ball remaining in the innings, he finally pulled off the move he has made against fast bowlers everywhere in the globe, sweeping Alzarri Joseph from far outside off into the stands past the square leg boundary.
Suryakumar Yadav, Player of the Match (MI): “Can say that [my best T20 innings]. Most importantly we batted first, at the meeting we decided we’ll keep the same tempo as we do when we’re chasing 200 plus. There was a lot of dew even after just 7-8 overs, one side was 75-80 metres, so I was prepared for scooping over third man or flicking over square leg. I wasn’t thinking of going straight. There’s a lot of practice that goes behind [my 360-degree game], so when I come out to the middle, I am very clear in my mind.”
Even though the Titans are excellent chasers, they were instantly in trouble when all of their top three hitters were out for single digits. Together, Shubman Gill, Hardik Pandya, and Wriddhiman Saha scored 12 runs.
With a charming little appearance, Vijay Shankar maintained the possibility of the unlikely alive. However, he was struck by Piyush Chawla’s opening delivery of the game, the 34-year-old IPL great having the best season of his career and adding 18 wickets to his total.
A rookie, age 29, was having a blast on the other end. Because Mumbai was having such difficulty with their bowling assault, Akash Madhwal entered the competition. The 26th T20 game of his career, and just his fourth in the IPL, was this one.
Furthermore, he has already demonstrated a desire for difficult work. bowling with games on the line, bowling to power hitters, and bowling in the final frames.
A gorgeous yorkie belongs to Madhwal. Because they continue to skid through when he hits a hard length, it suddenly seems like his other balls are just as lethal. Gill was bowled by him for a smaller total than the batter anticipated. The same method, he also put David Miller in lbw.
Rashid led the Titans with the bat as well, scoring 79 off 32 balls with 10 sixes, his greatest T20 score. 191 for 8 increased from 103 for 8 overall after 14 overs to 20 overs.
But there were still 27 missing. Imagine getting one wicket shy of five in a game where you were three-fourths of the way to a century and still lost.
