In the history of the Indian Premier League (IPL) Rahul Tripathi has to be one of the most underrated cricketers going around. Following his debut for Rising Pune Supergiants back in 2017, this is his fifth season in this glamorous league. Each year he comes in with a specialised batting role, performs a more than a decent job and then gets forgotten amid all the superstars of the IPL.
Tripathi has 1556 runs in 67 IPL matches — most by any uncapped player in this league. But the most noteworthy factor about this stat is that the 31-year old batter from Maharashtra has scored all these runs with a strike-rate of 139.93. And considering the versatile job he has performed for his franchises over the years, one must feel this is a commendable achievement.
The modern-day T20 cricket batting has become increasingly specialised. Gone are those days when the set template of batting was to attack in the power-play, milk the bowling with minimum risk in the middle-overs with ones and twos along with occasional big shots to prepare a platform for late onslaught and then go berserk at the end. Now teams tend to pick batters who can take risks at all phases of the innings.
And Tripathi falls under that category.
Mostly in his IPL career he has been used as a floater. With a strike-rate of 158.13 over his first 10 balls, he can go off the block in no time. Furthermore, unlike some of the more renowned power-hitters in the IPL, Tripathi can up the ante both against pace and spin with equal confidence and success rate. And this particular skill set was demonstrated pretty well in Sunrisers colours during his match-winning 37-ball 71 against his former team Kolkata at the Brabourne stadium on Friday night.
Chasing 176 on a green top, Tripathi was in early when Hyderabad lost in-form Abhishek Sharma in the second over. Pat Cummins was bowling the hard length whereas at the other end Umesh Yadav was searching for little-bit of late movement by pitching the ball up. Considering the greenery on the surface, it was an ideal bowling combination. But Tripathi, with quick judgement of length and movement of feet, made a mockery of it.
The 10 balls he faced, produced 22 whereas in the next 10 he got 27. His 21-ball half-century was the joint-second-fastest of IPL 2022, and when he left the crease SRH needed just 43 off 34 balls. The 37-ball existence at the crease took the game away from Kolkata. And at times because of his near perfect execution, his stroke play seemed effortless and completely risk-free.
When pacers like Cummins and Andre Russell pitched short, Tripathi was quick to play the horizontal bat shots whereas against the flatter trajectories of Varun Chakravarthy’s ‘mystery’ spin, he stretched his front foot and played his trademark lofted extra cover drives. Though against Sunil Narine, he seemed a little bit cautious. Meanwhile, with the help of such exuberant batsmanship, Tripathi never allowed the KKR bowling attack to settle down and after the game even the opponent skipper Shreyas Iyer had no hesitation in admitting that.
“I thought it was a good total. Rahul Tripathi didn’t allow us to settle down [He] came in and changed the momentum and didn’t allow us to settle. Credit to the pace with which they played.”
This is the kind of skillset and intent Tripathi brings to the table. And remember, to perform this role of aggressor on a consistent basis, he has sacrificed his batting average (27.79) and with that perhaps a chance to get noticed at a higher level. However, the Sunrisers management identified his specialised trait of his prior to the auction and went on to spend a whopping INR8.5 crore to secure his services.
So far after registering a duck in the first game Tripathi has shaped up pretty well — scoring 44, 39*, 17* and 71 in his next four innings with three of them resulting in victories. With skipper Kane Williamson opening the innings, he finally has a permanent spot in the batting order at No.3. And with 171 runs – the most for an SRH batter so far in this season, Tripathi is already having an impact on that position, that too with a smile on his face.
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