The structural imbalance in T20 cricket between number of wickets and overs, made worse by the impact player and flatter pitches, combined with the game’s frenetic evolution and stripping of flab, has added to our vocabulary a term that would have been considered preposterous not long ago: “a match-losing hundred”. In casual conversations, there is some wordplay exercised with players’ names, but let’s not get into mockery territory in this space.
It is preposterous because what do you mean my hundred has hurt my side? There was never a time before T20s when you wished your best, most-prolific batter packed up before it became physically impossible for them to continue. Through decades-long conditioning, there emerged a kind of batter that frequently overstayed their welcome in T20s – scoring hundreds too slow, which denied their team the maximisation of the 20 overs.
On April 25, though, across two IPL 2026 matches, we might just have crossed another threshold and stepped into another dimension. No T20 hipster would go so far as to label either KL Rahul‘s 152 off 67 in Delhi or Vaibhav Sooryavanshi‘s 103 off 37 in Jaipur anything short of sensational, let alone “match-losing hundreds”, but at the end of the night, these two were part of teams that had lost with seven and nine balls to spare respectively.
It was a monumental day of cricket in the IPL. And not just because of the numbers, which were quite extraordinary. A total of 986 runs were scored in 77.2 overs with 59 sixes and the highest successful chase in all T20 cricket. Never before had two IPL matches on the same day aggregated 900.
More than these numbers – 16 dropped catches did contribute to them – it was the personnel at the heart of these happenings that made it a somewhat poignant day.
Rahul turned 34 last week. Far be it for us to say he is the past of this format, but even we had given up on hoping for the kind of great things we originally expected from him in T20s. Coming into this Saturday, 12 openers had scored a minimum of 200 runs this IPL. Rahul’s strike rate of 166.66 sat in the middle, at No. 7, slightly better than Virat Kohli‘s. You see where we are going? For all his evolution and hard work, it appeared Rahul was only staying afloat in a format he would never be elite in again.
And then came this innings. The kind that should be on the bucket list of any serious T20 batter. Rahul made 36 boundary attempts in 67 balls, a rate that might bring tears of joy to the eyes of people who believe in Rahul. He succeeded on 25 of those attempts. If only he had freed himself up enough of the consequences and had attempted boundaries more often than once every four balls over the years in the IPL.
Then again, all this seems moot looking at how much T20 batting has changed during Rahul’s career. If his work on this Saturday was a belligerent refusal to be consigned to the past, the scary future took another step towards becoming the present. Sooryavanshi added Pat Cummins, another fair shout to be counted among the greats of the game, to Jasprit Bumrah, Josh Hazlewood and Sunil Narine on the list of great bowlers who were humbled by a 15-year-old boy in their first exchange. Bumrah and Cummins: first-ball six. Narine: second-ball six. Hazlewood: four balls, four boundaries including a six.
The most precocious prodigy since Sachin Tendulkar tried to hit boundaries off 26 of the 37 balls he faced. He scored at nearly three a ball, and yet only ten of his 103 runs came off anything but the middle of the bat.
It was an intense reminder to those watching that batters of Rahul’s category can try their darnedest every year, but the future is just too scary and approaching at a rate we can’t quite make complete sense of.
And it is not just the prodigious exception that Sooryavanshi is. For what it’s worth, he is still the future of Indian T20 cricket, but his solo show was outdone by the tag-team effort from the present of Indian T20 cricket: Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan.
Two of the top three of the World Cup-winning Indian side, Abhishek and Kishan might have taken note that while they are the incumbents, not every day will they come up against sides in which someone goes at Sooryavanshi’s pace and then somebody plays the kind of counterproductive knock that Dhruv Jurel did: 51 off 35. There was a time in that innings when Sooryavanshi was 63 off 21 and Jurel 22 off 20.
In between this intermingling of at least three timelines of T20 cricket came Punjab Kings (PBKS). A chase of 265, mounted on the most welcome phenomena that rampant T20 cricket has wrought. In another era, Prabhsimran Singh and Priyansh Arya might have ended up as journeymen cricketers. Never say never, but they are not likely to be regular internationals even now. But they are household names with careers that are enriching both financially and creatively.
Arya and Prabhsimran have managed to do this through an evolved understanding of the format, which makes them willing to attack as much as they do, and to put in the hard work to become so good at their attacking shots that they do yield a certain critical success rate when they attack. Not everybody needs to be an India player and a world champion. This is the second-largest, and thus the second-richest, sport in the world, and it should have room for non-internationals as well to enjoy lucrative careers.
On a day of extraordinary feats in the IPL, when past and future internationals soared and crossed paths, these two non-internationals made arguably the greatest impact without scoring the most runs. Long may this breed prosper.
