MATCH STORIES
Follow UsIt was the 16th over of the game between Lucknow Super Giants and Kolkata Knight Riders at the Ekana International Cricket Stadium in Lucknow, and Shreyas Iyer was finally making his way to the crease.
KKR were at 171/4 and in a solid position to finish with a bumper score in a ground that hadn't witnessed a single 200+ score this year. Iyer played well, in all honesty. He wasn’t belligerent like Ramandeep Singh, who scored 25 runs in just six deliveries. Iyer struck at 153.3 and scored 23 runs in 15 balls. According to Cricket.com’s Player Impact ratings, which measure a player’s contribution to their team’s victory, Ramandeep’s ratings were 5.8 while Iyer’s was just 0.9.
These numbers and the difference between the two players shouldn’t shock anyone. Ramandeep is a designated finisher. Playing such high ‘impact’ knocks late in the innings is how he puts food on his table.
The question here becomes, what was Iyer doing by coming at the death when only 29 deliveries were left in the innings? After all, on average, he has hit just one boundary in his first ten balls this IPL and has a strike rate of 138.7 on them. It’s clear that by no means he’s an appropriate batter for that position. So why didn't he bat up in the order where he's trained to do his job?
Iyer himself had an answer for it in the post-match presentation.
“Great start by both the openers. They have been phenomenal. We have to be flexible with left-right combination; bowlers have to change their approach with this, as this plays into bowlers’ minds.”
Phil Salt and Sunil Narine gave a fantastic start to KKR, just like they have done all season. By the time Salt was dismissed, KKR were 61/1 in just four overs. Then came young Angkrish Raghuvanshi, who had done what KKR needed him to do at three and a lot at just 18 years of age. At Ekana, he was sluggish in his 26-ball 32, but throughout the season, he has carried on the momentum the openers gave him efficiently.
Number four has been Iyer’s spot in white ball cricket, whether in the T20 format or the ODIs. That phase where the powerplay has just ended and the spinners have just come in to bowl - which is Iyer’s bread and butter. His best innings this season, the 50 that came at 138.9 against RCB, was when he reached the crease at the end of the powerplay.
But because KKR have ensured that Andre Russell’s entry point is between overs 12 and 14 in six out of the eight innings he has batted, Iyer’s entry point at Ekana was compromised. He came in to bat only after both Russell and Raghuvanshi were dismissed.
Hence, Shreyas Iyer, the batter, has kept meandering in KKR’s middle order throughout this IPL season. A brief look at his entry points this season will tell you that. In fact, if you observe his case in isolation, you’ll infer one very stark fact - KKR might not actually need Iyer’s batting.
In fact, if KKR’s batting lineup is a ship full of hitters, Iyer’s the anchor with minimal use.
They could always bring Manish Pandey as an impact substitute if they needed someone to arrest an occasional top-order collapse, just like they did recently. This would have also allowed them to strengthen their relatively weak bowling by using the likes of Suyash Sharma.
He would have pushed his case further as a batter if he had shown some extraordinary growth in his batting, but alas, his good strike rate of 138.6 this season is not only overshadowed but buried deep down by the other top seven batters in his side, who all have better strike rates than him.
Now, if you are willing to look even deeper into the abyss of Iyer’s T20 career, you can further ask this question - is there hope for him? What does his future look like in a world where his batting average of 32.43 and a strike rate of 136.2 for KKR don’t make him stand out as an elite batter? How long will his brand value and stature in Indian cricket keep him as the captain of this KKR side?
Answers to all these questions are bleak. For instance, if you look at his T20I prospects for India, there hardly seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel for him. After being selected as a reserve in the 2021 T20 World Cup, he failed to make the cut in the next two World Cup squads. There are the likes of Sanju Samson and Shivam Dube, who bat much better than him in the middle order for India, and he doesn’t even have a secondary skill to rely on, which can push his case for national selection.
All of this brings us back to the point that you started the article with - this IPL season has not done anything spectacular for Shreyas Iyer’s T20 career, which has perennially been dwindling in the void. In fact, it has created even more chaos and questions around his T20 batting.
If KKR weren’t doing this well, there’s no doubt that there would have been more scrutiny on his batting contributions, which, to be fair to him, are decent but don’t match the hype that surrounds him.
However, this existential dread can wait for Iyer, the batter. He’ll have an entire month after the IPL to decide ‘to be or not be’.
Stats inputs by Suryanarayanan S
