A team needs five of two balls. In the fold there is a man who has only entered the XI game due to an injury to the batter who usually occupies the place; He’s one break away from an inaugural century of the Indian Premier League, a few short breaks away from completing a breathless chase. A young hitter whose own precociousness, when he was 17 years old, people were already talking about him as the next MS Dhoni, has meant that at just 22 years old, most people dismiss him as an ancient.
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This story should end in a century and a victory, but no, this is the story of Ishan Kishan. It ends with him hollowing out a meter below the 99 limit. It ends with him sitting completely exhausted, his head in his hands, watching his team lose the match in a Super Over after having designed a chase masterclass.
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Kishan knows well this terrible feeling of being almost there.
When he emerged as one of India’s best young goalkeeper hitters in 2015, the boy from Patna swiftly passed the talented side of Jharkhand: Saurabh Tiwary (the man he replaced in the Mumbai Indians game), Varun Aaron, Ishank Jaggi, Shahbaz Nadeem – all the names the Indian selectors had to sit down and take notice.
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Kishan had good technique, the ability to explode with the bat and a lot of flamboyance.
He also had Rahul Dravid as a mentor during his formative years. This was the moment when Dravid was assembling one of the best U19 teams in history, such as Rishabh Pant, Washington Sundar, Sarfaraz Khan, Khaleel Ahmed and Avesh Khan. The 2016 U-19 World Cup arrived and Kishan was chosen to lead the team. This was a boy who was being fed for a great future. Runs, however, abandoned Kishan when it mattered most. India lost the U-19 World Cup final to the West Indies, but Kishan finished the tournament with the worst batting average among the team he led.
When the IPL came that year, the 17-year-old Kishan was picked up by the recently disappeared Gujarat Lions on the basis of his promise. He endured a season of failure and then another of mediocrity. But the promise remained. He was still just a teenager. When the money-spending Mumbai Indians wanted an Indian goalie-hitter for their team in 2018, they focused on Kishan. They parted ways with a huge sum – Rs6.2 crore – for him. It really didn’t work; Kishan offered brief flashes of brilliance and then staggered. He watched as Pant, his understudy at the 2016 World Cup, quietly advanced in the race to become India’s goalkeeper-elect.
The Netflix series ‘Cricket Fever: Mumbai Indians’ showcased Kishan’s struggles. Hitting coach Robin Singh maintained that Kishan didn’t know how to build innings at one point in the show, which is based on Mumbai ‘s 2018 season.
“He just wants to hit everything,” Singh said. “He cannot work with the ball. It could use a little more intelligence. ”
As the flaws accumulated on the field, attention began to shift, unfavorably, to Kishan’s flamboyance, his off-the-field love of glitter and ink.
People remembered that he was once arrested for reckless driving in Patna, just a week before the U-19 team left for the 2016 World Cup.
In the documentary, after Kishan finishes a session with the team nutritionist, he says, “Ishan needs a little more discipline.” In another scene, he’s at the gym, being his usual self, but strength and conditioning coach Paul Chapman isn’t impressed. “You’re not applying yourself, you’re basically being an idiot,” he tells Kishan.
But there is another aspect of the Jharkhand goalkeeper. The one who saw him crush 273 against Delhi at Ranji in the 2016-17 season. The one who saw him score a fiery 87 on a woefully ill-prepared pitch for a Ravinder Jadeja at Rajkot, was 17 at the time, playing his first Ranji season for Jharkhand.
The one who, on Monday, grabbed the lifeline that was thrown at him and fought tooth and nail for a brilliant inning.
Which side of Kishan will we see through this IPL?
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