How Ishan Kishan came of age
For a brief moment, consider what might’ve been going through Ishan Kishan as he witnessed the England bowling unit pick things up from right where they were left off the other night in Ahmedabad. Sam Curran teased and toyed with his opening partner’s defense by persisting with the line of the off-stump, which ultimately proved to get a massive breakthrough. KL Rahul was walking back to the pavilion with no runs on the board in the very first over! India’s nightmares from the first T20I had come alive again.
Ishan Kishan has gone through the wringers of domestic cricket and has had to pay his dues before getting his deserved national team call-up. Though the opportunity for him to wear the proud Indian colours arrived much later than it did for his U19 batchmates Rishabh Pant and Washington Sundar, Kishan would only need to take a look in the dugout at his Mumbai Indians teammate debuting on the same night to remind himself to stay grounded. Time works differently for everyone.
And yet, with Jofra Archer racing at him, ready to bowl his usual 140 click delivery, speculating and contemplating about the would-have-been could prove to be fatal. India had to deliver in this match and Ishan Kishan had a job to do. With the scoreboard reading 0 for 1, the first ball the left-hander faced in international cricket was short and directed towards leg stump and all he had to do was push it down leg slip for a boundary. For the successive delivery, he smartly decided to rotate the strike back to his captain.
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In the next over, the batsman from Jharkhand greeted Sam Curran’s short ball with his exceptional pull shot. He’d play several of those over the course of the night, with each one being more entertaining than the last. Having gotten two boundaries with ease, Ishan Kishan from a few years ago would’ve continually gone for the big blows. But this one was a more visibly mature version of him, akin to the one we saw last season in the IPL.
This Kishan realizes the weight riding on the shoulders of a batsman and knows and understands the difference between explosiveness and recklessness. Quite often, the smartest way to play with bowlers’ heads is to smack them and then rotate the strike in order to disrupt their rhythm.
“I have seen how they (Hardik and Krunal Pandya and Kieran Pollard) plan a game, map their innings, confuse opposition by switching between big-hitting and strike rotation,” the 22-year-old said after the match. By that time, he had taken the game out of England’s grasp, helped India to an important win, and won a Man of the Match on his debut.
Ishan Kishan credited his stint with Mumbai Indians massively for playing a vital role in the journey and their influence on the young gun isn’t hard to discern. Just three years ago, Ishan Kishan was a reckless 19-year-old who didn’t understand the importance of diets, gym training, and discipline. He often drew the ire of batting coach Robin Singh who perpetually complained that the lad ‘wants to hit everything, he cannot work the ball.’
Two IPL seasons with poor returns attested to that fact. Therefore, at the beginning of 2020, Ishan stood at a precarious situation. Mumbai Indians had every reason to release him and yet they chose to stick with him, believing in his magnificent talent. Saurabh Tiwary started at Kishan’s spot for the first two games in UAE. However, an injury niggle to his Jharkhand teammate opened the avenues for him to make a comeback.
This time around, he was in no mood to squander the tiny window of opportunity given to him to impress. In his very first start, Ishan Kishan nearly won the match for the defending champions with a knock of 99 runs from 58 balls. His innings was also uncharacteristic in the sense that the youngster finally seemed to realize the importance of taking the game deep. He started his innings at run-a-ball pace, playing the role of anchor until the 10th over of the match. It was only when Rohit Sharma and Suryakumar Yadav got out, that he decided to put his foot on the gas.
The batsman from Jharkhand showed the same level of maturity and consistency throughout the entire competition and ended up scoring 516 runs, the highest for an uncapped Indian player. Riding on the back of a successful IPL season where Mumbai Indians became champions once again, he made his way to the national side and staked his claim from the word go.
In his innings against England during the second T20, Ishan Kishan waited patiently for the first 10 deliveries. Sizing up the pitch conditions and the opponents, something the batsmen were guilty of not doing well in the previous match, he picked the good balls and left the bad ones. It was only during Tom Curran’s over when the 22-year-old swung his arms and showed his brute strength to the Motera crowd.
He played only two false shots on the night, the one where Ben Stokes ironically missed a catch after Michael Vaughan criticized the Indian camp of dismal fielding and the one where he finally got out. However, an interesting point to be made here is that the game was in India’s hands in both of those situations. Surviving the scare of being dropped at 40, Kishan turned entertainer and hit two huge sixes off the first couple of balls of Adil Rashid’s over to bring up his 50 in his first international outing. Only Ajinkya Rahane has managed to do the same for India on his debut in T20 cricket.
It was only after he crossed the landmark of 50 runs that Ishan decided to go for the swash-buckling shots and eventually, got out while trying to reverse hit Adil Rashid. He went on to lament that in the post-match presser and assured that if he’s in a similar stage, he’ll try to bring the game home for his country. Sounds like another long-haired big-hitter from Jharkhand bursting onto the scene of Indian cricket, doesn’t it?
Following a dream debut, the verdict is out: Ishan Kishan fits India’s T20I side like a glove. He’s grown from a brash adrenaline-fueled teenager trying to get the meat of the bat on to every delivery and has evolved into a batsman who possesses both the beauty and the brawn in his arsenal. Having an exciting young left-handed attacking batsman in Rishabh Pant was already frivolous to begin with, adding Ishan Kishan into the top order makes India’s batting unit look almost illegal.
Despite the promise, there are several things that could go wrong from here. The thing about attacking batsmen is that it looks brilliant when it works out. On some other nights, the finest of margins makes them look stupid. Virat Kohli was quick to acknowledge the valiant brand of attacking cricket that his debutant believes in and pleaded him to stick to his mettle. The brevity of his words must also meet the boldness of his decisions and Team India must ensure that Ishan is continually backed like they so marvelously did with Pant.
Only time will tell the heights that Ishan Kishan ends up scaling but going by his resplendent show in his first international outing, he’s here to stay and make a name.
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