In a line-up stacked with batters who can destroy bowling attacks on their good days, Ravindra Jadeja is an outlier. But in an era of belters, what happens when you are faced with a surface just a touch more demanding? That’s when Jadeja’s value as a batter comes through.
When he walked in against Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) on Wednesday, Rajasthan Royals (RR) were 62 for 4 in nine overs. The innings was wobbling on a pitch offering movement for quick bowlers, making big-hitting risky. Jadeja realised he had to bide his time to put up a total big enough to defend. “The wicket was not that easy because the ball was seaming and swinging, so I thought let me play longer as much as I can,” he said later on the broadcast. “That is what I was talking to Shimron [Hetmyer] and [those] who were coming next for batting. I was just talking to him that we play longer.”
He was at the other end as Hetmyer briefly counterattacked before falling, but Jadeja went about it his own way. He resisted the urge to premeditate, worked the field for singles and twos, hovered around the run-a-ball mark, taking 24 deliveries to find his first boundary – the longest any batter has taken since the start of the 2024 season- and stitching together stands with Donovan Ferreira and Shubham Dubey to drag RR out of immediate trouble.
This has long been a feature of Jadeja’s batting, where he has found a way to recalibrate T20’s default settings when conditions demand it. Among batters who have faced 100-plus balls in IPL 2026, he has the lowest strike rate: 128. He absorbs pressure, deals in low-risk accumulation, and waits for the one bowler or one over that he can line up, a template familiar from all his years with Chennai Super Kings (CSK).
In 2021, he was 26 off 21 against Royal Challengers Bengaluru at the end of the 19th over before hitting 37 off Harshal Patel in a single over, playing a match-winning role with the bat and later with the ball. In 2024, against Punjab Kings, he struck 12 off the final over to push CSK to 167, a total he then helped defend – his last Player-of-the-Match performance before this one.
On the day, he waited till the last over of RR’s innings, which started at 139 for 6. Mayank Yadav, who was playing his first match of the season, was against him. A slower, back-of-a-length delivery was pulled fiercely for four first ball – the first boundary of Jadeja’s innings – and from there, he kept the pressure on, running three twos off pulls and heaves and also flat-batting another four past mid-off. The over ended with a top-edged six over deep backward square – his first six in five innings so far this season – and 20 came off the over as RR finished on a far more competitive 159 for 6.
It was very much Jadeja’s template. In the 20th over in the IPL over the years, Jadeja has struck at 214.4, with 33 sixes and 24 boundaries in 84 innings.
“We were able to cash in and we got 20 runs,” he said. “I was just backing my strength [in the 20th over] and I was talking to my partner [Dubey], that let’s back each other and let’s play good cricket shots. On this wicket, the ball was seaming a lot and bounce was there, so it’s not that easy to play any shot at any given time.”
That game and situational awareness – something that has defined Jadeja’s career – with the bat carried into his bowling.
In a season where match-ups have often dictated caution – recent case in point being Axar Patel not bowling to Sunrisers Hyderabad’s left-hand batters on Tuesday – Jadeja came on to bowl to the left-handed Nicholas Pooran, one of LSG’s most dangerous hitters. Bowling from around the wicket, he kept it away from Pooran’s arc, subtly “mixing up his pace” and resisting the temptation to dart it in. He also bowled a second over on the trot and went on to dismiss Pooran with a length ball on off which was mistimed to long-on. He had bowled a similar delivery to dismiss another big-hitting left-hand batter, Shivam Dube, in the match against CSK earlier this season.
Jadeja later pointed to his time out with the bat as key to the bowling plan. “It’s not easy to bowl to a left-handed batsman as a left-arm spinner,” he said at the press conference. “But sometimes the conditions help you – you get a little spin from the wicket and the ball stops a little. So, as a batter, if I am playing and a spinner is bowling to me and the ball is getting stuck or getting a little grip, then I will not try to take every chance. [It’s] the other way around when I bowl and a leftie bats; he also remembers that the ball is getting stuck and spinning. But I won’t say that you can bowl [to a plan] every time because it’s the T20 format, sometimes you have to take the best decision. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
Pooran’s wicket further tilted the game in RR’s favour, and Jadeja marked it with a new in-the-pocket celebration. “Yeah, he’s in my pocket,” he said, laughing. “[The celebration] just randomly came into my mind and I did it.”
Against SRH earlier this season, with RR at 9 for 5 in a chase of 217, he softened the blow of a heavy defeat with 45 off 32 balls in a 118-run stand with Ferreira. The runs were not just good for Jadeja but for RR as well, with top-order batters Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, Yashasvi Jaiswal and Dhruv Jurel having been the major contributors for the first chunk of the season. There have been doubts about RR’s depth beyond the top five [Hetmyer and Riyan Parag the others] with their batting falling apart in back-to-back losses after a strong start.
“I personally think that we [middle order] got a chance to bat at the right time and that too in a pressure situation,” Jadeja said. “So that when we play an important match at an important stage, everyone should have the experience and opportunity to make runs. So it’s a good thing that everyone is batting. Sometimes it has happened in the past that the top three are performing and making runs and the rest of the batting didn’t [get to bat] much and they got exposed in an important match. So it’s a good thing that in the middle phase of the tournament, all the players are batting and that too in a pressure situation.”
Jadeja’s performance was a reminder of his importance in T20s. On a tricky pitch, he used his awareness, stayed true to his method, and eventually shaped the outcome as RR won the game by 40 runs.
