Tim David thinks of himself as a problem-solver. As one of the designated Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) lower-middle-order batters, there are days when he is putting the finishing touches to an innings, but there are also times when he is arresting a slide or batting with the tail, trying to take his team to safer shores. On most days, though, David is just “trying to have fun”.
What David does on a cricket field isn’t easy to replicate. From the outside, he is just a burly six-hitter whose only job is to belt anything and everything in his vicinity out of the park. But it’s more than that. Marrying high-risk batting with consistency is one of the hardest tasks in T20 cricket, and David has achieved that with reasonable success during his RCB stint.
David was one of their key weapons during their maiden title run in IPL 2025. He has carried that form into IPL 2026. This season, David has scored 173 runs in six innings at an average of 86.50, while striking at 203.52. He has faced just 85 balls and sent 26 of them to the boundary (12 fours and 14 sixes). Crucially, he’s managed to reach double-figures in each of the six innings, while remaining unbeaten four times.
“For me, it would be riskier to play defensively because the team would go, ‘you’re of no use to us, so see you later’,” David said in an interaction with select media in Bengaluru. “But it takes a lot of self-conviction to keep being able to take risks because you understand that if it doesn’t go well, you’re going to get criticised.
“A massive part of the IPL is not putting extra pressure on yourself and judging yourself harshly when you don’t come out on top. You have to kind of roll with the punches because games don’t always go how you want them to, and then when you have good days, you try and have fun.”
There are few better hitters of a cricket ball than an on-song David. Ask CSK, who were caught in the midst of a David storm at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, where even he went “wow, this is fun, let’s keep it going” en route an unbeaten 70 off 25 balls, with 68 of those runs coming in the death overs alone. Sometimes, even David enjoys looking at some of his shots on the big screen.
“When I’m on a roll, it’s pretty good fun to watch,” he said. “I feel nice when I’m watching it as well sometimes, so once you get that feeling, it’s pretty cool. But the biggest challenge is going to be consistency because I want to push the thresholds, I want to try and be as damaging as I can. They’re my strengths so there’s always going to be shortcomings.
“The way cricket is, the runs come heavily and you play so well and then they dry up and you think where they’re going to come from, so hopefully it keeps looking on me nicely.”
The one area David has improved massively in over the last two seasons is his game against spin. Before IPL 2025, David boasted a strike rate of 187.74 against pace and while the sample size is comparatively smaller, he struck at only 108.23 vs spin. Those numbers got closer to each other in 2025: 195.45 vs pace and 165.71 vs spin. And so far in IPL 2026, David is striking at 244.44 against spin as compared to 192.53 against pace.
“I’ve always felt like I played spin better than pace. But then you come to India and you get challenged; you’re facing the best spin bowlers in the best competition and it’s a challenge for sure,” David said. “As a self-reflection, I wasn’t happy with how I was going against spin and the approach wasn’t really getting me anywhere. I had a rethink with my coach back at home and we talked about how I wanted to play spin and maybe there were some technical adjustments we could make and then just really doubling down and backing yourself on that.
“I suppose I had some good results early when I made that change, so there was enough evidence there to suggest that the path we’d taken was an improvement on what we were trying to do before.”
Elaborating on the technical changes he has made, David said it was about trusting his defence more against spin but also “batting on instinct”.
“By technical changes, it means that you do the work that you trust when you’re trying to hit a ball somewhere that it goes to that place, so if that’s a forward defense or back-foot defense, you’re making that call based on the ball that comes down from the bowler,” he said. “Spin bowling is tough when you’re under pressure, because if you’re bowling to a batter who’s very tentative, you can dictate terms to them, you can try and spin the ball both ways. Whereas if you miss a ball a little bit short or a little bit full and the batter hits you 25 rows back, that’s scary I reckon, so for sure [you’re] trying to put them under pressure.”
David is having a top-notch year-and-a-half. In January 2025, he became a BBL champion with Hobart Hurricanes; four months later, he was an IPL champion with RCB. Soon after, he recorded Australia’s fastest T20I century off just 37 balls against West Indies. There was a gap after that when a hamstring injury ruled him out of BBL 2025-26 late last year and he then had an underwhelming T20 World Cup. But now, back at the comforts of IPL and RCB, the six-hitting machine is firing again.
“I’ve just tried to free myself up a lot,” David said about his good run of form. “I play cricket for ten-11 months of the year and I’m away from home a lot, so I try to enjoy training. I’ve been training harder than ever; the coaches have to kick me out of the nets. I am just enjoying when you play because you can go down the route of putting a lot of pressure on yourself when you play. So, I’m either going to spend 11 months of the year in anxiety or I can just try my best.”
David’s is a very specific role. In most T20 teams, but especially at RCB, which is a top-heavy set-up. He often doesn’t get a lot of time in the middle and has to be assertive almost from the get-go. David has devised strategies to counter that in training.
“You have to get your volume of balls in practice because you don’t get to bat all the time in the matches,” he said. “It’s practising your basics, making sure you face some really basic throws from coaches and working on making sure your technical structure is sound and then obviously you need to have the power for hitting. So a lot of practice in that and working on different ways you want to take the balls down. But then, when you get into a game, it’s trying to do it within your strength.
“You have to be able to hit yorkers; you have to have ways of scoring against different bowling, and you understand after playing for a long time the patterns that bowlers will try to use to slow you down. And I think a lot of it is a foundation I’ve built up over a long time.”
David loves his golf – he’s a handicap six; he loves his gym routines; he loves hitting sixes. And in all that, he’s carving his own identity on the way to becoming one of the fiercest finishers the IPL has ever seen. All while having fun.
