Tilak Varma tried to do the right thing. He just didn’t know what it was.
For a while, his response to the crisis Mumbai Indians (MI) found themselves in – three down in 5.5 overs – was to work within its limitations. It left him with a whole heap of self-loathing.
He saw Rashid Khan drift into his pads. He knew it opened up a risk-free but high-volume option. The leg glance for four. The connection wasn’t great, though. And the ball wandered off well in front of square. A disappointed Tilak tried to run a single. The bowler cut right across his path and denied him even that pittance.
Tilak only had hate for the runs that were coming his way. He didn’t even seem to want one of them. He was too busy walloping himself, bringing the bat straight down onto his pad with a force that was never on call when he actually needed it. And it wasn’t just this game. Tilak’s highest score in IPL 2026 was 20. He hadn’t hit a single six.
And then, all of a sudden, he did.
Sometimes you can get caught up doing the right thing. On Monday, it just stopped Tilak from doing anything. He wasn’t finding form again. He wasn’t helping his team recover from the early wickets. On 19 off 22 with only six overs left, he was moving ever closer to a situation where MI coach Mahela Jayawardene might once again have thought about retiring him out.
This is why some of the greatest players in the game remind themselves not to take it too seriously. Mitchell Starc used to wear a wristband with the words “F it. Bowl fast.” Jos Buttler spelled the cuss word all the way out – courting trouble from the ICC – on top of his bat handle. “It’s just a good reminder when I’m in the middle, when I’m questioning myself, and it brings me back to a good place.”
A strategic time-out gave Tilak the chance to get out of his own head. On the broadcast, there was also a mention of how Hardik Pandya might have helped. He had seen his friend spiralling and he yanked him out of it.
“The kind of talent Tilak has, he really does not need to worry about a lot,” the MI captain said after his team climbed off the bottom of the points table, and into seventh place, with a 99-run win over Gujarat Titans (GT). “So the only message I kept telling him [was] that you’re gonna just watch the ball and hit the ball irrespective of what, because I genuinely believe the kind of [way the] ball travels from his bat is something really special. It was about time he comes and delivers.”
When Tilak took strike again, he stopped being run by fear. So when a perfectly good length delivery outside off stump came, there were only possibilities, and he picked the most outrageous one, scooping it over the keeper for four. Also, now when Rashid made a mistake – tossing one up a touch too wide – he was in a better frame of mind to smash it down the ground for six.
Because he wasn’t so hell-bent on doing the right thing anymore.
“Last five games, I haven’t spent much time in the middle,” Tilak said after winning every award – best strike rate, most sixes, most fours, and the Player of the Match – at the presentation ceremony. “So I was just thinking this game I want to spend time in between, in the centre of the wicket. If you see first 20 balls, I was just, ball by ball, I was just batting. And later on I know, when I bat few balls in the wicket, I know [what] I’m capable of.”
When he sent Ashok Sharma’s 150 kph thunderbolts for 6, 4, 4, 6, 6 in the 18th over, he was riding on so much adrenaline that he raised a fist. All those panicked runs that he’d made earlier in the innings, wanting more but settling for less, were already fading away, allowing him to get get caught up in something altogether beautiful.
The joy of just hitting that damn ball.
Nineteen off 22 had turned into 75 off 37. This doesn’t happen very often. And he’s played the game long enough to know it. That’s why he was savouring every bit of it, screaming into the night air when he launched that last six off Ashok. By now his mind was so clear that he was pre-empting what the bowler was trying to do. He waited for the slower ball and slog-swept it out of the ground. He set himself up for the yorker and cleared the long-off boundary. “The way I carried [on], I’m really proud,” Tilak said.
No batter in the history of the IPL has ever buried their demons this way. This quickly. In the end, Tilak recorded MI’s joint-fastest century 18 years after Sanath Jayasuriya first set it. Only four players in the IPL have had the privilege of getting to three figures after coming in at No. 5 or lower. Tilak’s unbeaten 101 off 45 was a rarity even in a league that throws up absolutely impossible things.
