IPL 2018: Evolutionary road of KL Rahul to produce a breakout year

A willowy batsman had just driven a whippy seamer through cover. “I was watching from the side, so didn’t know how much the ball swung or whether it swung at all, but I distinctly remember the batsman’s follow-through, so still and elegant, so text-bookish, feet right up to the pitch of the ball and the front elbow high and upright,” he recollects.
For the next session and a half, between countless yawns, milk-tea and hand-rolled beedis, he soaked in the whip-crack artistry of the batsman, his pronounced front-elbow and the geometric arc of his bat-swing. “I had seen Sachin bat here, Sehwag and Dhawan getting hundreds, this man I thought was right up in their league. I’m not a cricket tragic and I’m not a fan of anyone, but this guy I thought was someone special,” he remembers.

It was KL Rahul, compiling what he considers one of his finest first-class performances, 98 on a wickedly-swinging Lahli pitch in December 2013, exactly a year before he collected his Test stripes at the MCG. After the day’s play, the curator responsible for the devilishly seaming strips didn’t forget to convey his admiration of the 21-year-old batsman. He also felt vindicated about his pitches, the sort that leave most batsmen smirking. “He showed good batsmen can score runs on any type of wicket, spinning or seaming.”

This IPL season, there’s no escaping Rahul’s elbow, for the audience as well as the bowlers. (Illustration by C R Sasikumar)

Around 3,000 kilometres away in Mangalore, Samuel Jayaraj, Rahul’s childhood coach, couldn’t watch a single ball because the Ranji Trophy match wasn’t televised. But he could visualise every stroke. “I have seen him so much that I could see the innings unfold in front of me, his range, rhythm, pattern, the things that he’s doing correctly when he’s batting well and the mistakes when he’s not,” he says.

Even now, just by seeing the follow-through the coach can gauge whether Rahul is in a good frame of mind or not. “The alignment of his front elbow is a tell-tale sign. If it’s straight and high, I know he’s in his zone, driving well, seeing the ball early and judging the length well,” he says.

Conversely, a strangled follow-through, that is when his leading elbow collapses while driving, betrays a cluttered mind. Reflexively, like a card-castle nudged from the base, the alignment crumbles— the head drops, the wrists break, and back-foot staggers across, resulting in Rahul losing his shape and thus the optimum control over the stroke. “I feel the position of the elbow is the most important aspect for a batsman, especially when he plays the defensive strokes and the drives. This is the first principle of batting I teach my kids and even now I tell Rahul to always maintain a high front elbow,” he says.

Coach, you proud of this?
“Head still and Elbows high!”
Just like you taught me.👏 Forever Grateful to my coach Samuel Jayaraj.😊👑 pic.twitter.com/Tap5EtUGLc

— K L Rahul (@klrahul11) 28 April 2018

Little wonder then that after reeling off the fastest half-century in the IPL a few weeks ago, Rahul posted a side-on picture of himself with the under-script: “Coach, you proud of this? Head still and Elbows high! Just like you taught me. Forever Grateful to my coach Samuel Jayaraj.”

The message moistened Jayaraj’s eyes. “I felt overwhelmed, a wonderful little tribute. I used to tell him almost a hundred times a day (to keep the elbow high). He got so fixated that his roommates used to joke that he even slept with a high front elbow,” he says.

His own elbow-fixation came watching idols Sunil Gavaskar and Gundappa Viswanath. “It was an aspect of their batting that caught my eyes very early. In my playing days, I tried to inculcate that aspect into the game, but it was a little too late. So when I began coaching, I ensured that it was the first thing I taught the kids,” he says.

This IPL season, there’s no escaping Rahul’s elbow, for the audience as well as the bowlers. Beyond a point, it became a gradual, subconscious indoctrination.

***

Sometime after Australia’s tour of India last year, David Warner, engaging his Twitter followers with a Q and A session, was asked who his favourite Indian batsman, apart from Virat Kohli, was. Much to their surprise, he scribbled KL Rahul’s name. The puzzled fan counter-pointed: “Do you think he’s better than Pujara and Rahane?” Warner replied, “Yeah, he’s a champion. Up there with Kohli.”

The pair had bonded in the Sunrisers Hyderabad dressing room, where Rahul spent a couple of seasons, when he didn’t enjoy much game time or tangible results, but familiarised and internalised the essence of the format up close. “Before he joined them, he had self-doubts over his future and place in the T20 scheme. It didn’t help that a lot of people were asking him whether his classical game is at odds with T20. But Warner changed it all, and drilled into him the confidence he was lacking,” reflects Jayaraj.

Perceptibly, Warner’s hammer-blow technique and derring-do approach were different. The leading front elbow is almost non-existent, the drive is more of a clump, and the heaves, hoicks and slashes are not coaching-manual canon. But Rahul observed Warner and filtered and assimilated into his game what could benefit him, without compromising his technical appropriateness.

Rahul observed David Warner and filtered and assimilated into his game what could benefit him, without compromising his technical appropriateness. (Source: Express Archive)

Like the pull shot. Jayaraj swears Rahul always had a convincing pull — necessitated by the matting wickets in a town known for quick bowlers — but he was reluctant to deploy it on the big stage. Like for instance, in his debut series against Australia, he hardly pulled, though he used to leave it nicely. “Maybe because he got out playing that shot in a couple of first-class matches. But Warner told him that he himself gets out a lot of times playing the short-arm pull, but he continues to use it because he has a good success rate,” says Jayaraj.

Soon, Rahul shed his reluctance, and gradually the pull became one of his percentage strokes in the IPL, especially the most recent edition, where he seems to have developed a compulsive addiction to the stroke. Unlike bottom-handed players, he doesn’t flay it in front of square with brutish savagery, rather waits for the ball and strokes it finer to the square leg with a congruous swivel of his body, a delectable glance in the guise of a pull. Whether he plays it along the ground or in the air, he assesses the bounce, getting under it or riding it. As he waits till the ball reaches right under his eyes, he gets into good positions to even pull short- of-length deliveries.

As much as the pull, he has relied on the lofted drives, which he manages with a slight extension of the front elbow, and fluid transfer of his weight. The success of this shot is in his still head, points out Jayaraj.

“In the past sometimes, his head used to fall, but now it’s still, thus giving him optimal control,” he says.

As with the pull, it was again a case of psychologically attuning himself to the stroke. However, he is picky with the lofted shots. The really full balls, he crunches through cover or extra cover, his pet scoring area. But when it’s pulled back a trifle, he presses forward and swings the bat through a straight line, getting nicely behind the line of the ball. “He doesn’t reach out for the ball, and even if he does so, it’s not just his hands, but the entire body. These are things he learnt on his own, from the players he had watched like Warner and Virat (Kohli),” points out Jayaraj.

The other day, during his 94 against Mumbai in a losing cause, he unfurled a couple of strokes — bursts of improvisational ingenuity — that fuddled the coach. As the bowler hit the crease, Rahul began opening up his stance, his body shifting across. When the ball reached him, he was almost crouching, before, in the blink of an eye he reverse hits to the fence over second slip. “I have never seen him play that shot, but I can understand the logic behind it. The off-side was packed and the bowler was targeting fifth-sixth stump. So this was his plan to unsettle him,” explains Jayaraj.

The ramps, upper-cuts and scoops have all featured in his game, and as much as the runs he scores in front of the wicket, he has picked his spots behind the stumps too — as many as 151 runs off 50 deliveries have come in the inverted V.

“Look at the positions when playing the shot. That explains his success rate. He doesn’t pre-empt or move around much in the crease. He has a solid base, and if you have that you can play any shot you want,” he asserts.

His Sunrisers Hyderabad coach, Tom Moody, likened his mind to a sponge, absorbing and learning everything that comes his way. “He’s an articulate young guy and is always keen to engage in conversation and learn from his peers, someone who was eager to keep improving as a person and cricketer, which is a very good trait to have at such a young age,” the Australian had said soon after Rahul scored his maiden Test hundred.

He has 652 runs from 13 innings, and with at least one more game in hand, Rahul sits eighth in the chart of IPL’s highest run-getters in a season across all 11 editions. Irrespective of where he ends up after the tournament—it’s a studied gamble to assume that he might finish in the top 10—his form beggars this question: Is it a case of a good batsman having a great season or a great batsman having a good season?
It’s tempting to espouse the latter theory. For to have a breakout season is normal — for instance Rishabh Pant’s this season or Robin Uthappa’s in 2014 — but to have a breakout season of this scale and range is indicative of not fleeting but enduring genius.

The coach snaps: “I would call it good, not terrific. Terrific is when he scores these many runs in a Test series or a World Cup.”

The priorities of the coach (and undoubtedly his ward’s) go without saying.

***

No one wants to be Rahul’s roommate. It was a peculiar quandary that left Karnataka coaches stammering during his Ranji days. Rahul wouldn’t incessantly pester his roommate or keep him awake with bleary-eyed tales deep into the night, or blast loud music. But he had a spooky habit of playing out an innings even in sleep. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he would yell out for a run, or appeal loudly at the umpire, and sometimes would even call out his mate and urge him to run that extra run. And then he falls back into the sleep, the poor, fully awake room-mate left struggling to sleep. The worst part, his former coach J Arun Kumar says, is that he used to bat long even in the sleep: “Then he comes up fresh for the match while his roommate will be groggy,” he says.

To dream of the game corresponds to Rahul’s obsession with cricket. Jayaraj is not unused to Rahul calling him up in the middle of the night, asking him about some technical quirk or other. “It shows that he is perpetually learning and is not satisfied with what he already has learnt,” he says.

In his perpetual quest to polish and embellish his game, he’s very Kohli-like. It’s a slightly unsung disposition of the post-modern-day batsman’s eternal quest to refine and redefine their game, like their footballing and tennis contemporaries, on an upward trek for perfection and re-perfection. So just like he has embraced the freedom of a less-hierarchical, spatial dressing-room culture, he has imbibed the work ethic, and the fitness obsession. Rahul himself explains this: “Maybe, 10 years ago, with my tattoos and hairstyles and all, it would have been a different story. But here nobody interferes in each other’s space, and once you are in the middle, everybody is in their zone.”

To put this in perspective, it’s something that hardly inhabited the mindscape of preceding generations, more laidback and insouciant. There were exceptions like Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, but not many were willing to put in the hard yards to upgrade their game and defy the eventual flat-lining.

Dravid’s limited-over resurgence is a more classical case. Once ridiculed for his limited-over shortcomings, he recalibrated his game to emerge as one of the finest finishers before the finisher-exemplar of all burst forth.

Dravid, with minor technical tweaks, like shedding the initial back-and-across shuffle and instead using the depth of the crease, had an upswing in his limited-over career for nearly a decade from 1999.

Thus, his flicks in ODIs were whippier; the pull was no longer a novelty-artillery, but a regular ammo. The tucks, the dabs and the back-cut all burnished his repertoire. Even the scoop and reverse sweep made guest appearances. Also, he worked unearthly hard on his fitness, so that he could run harder and bat longer. If Dravid has been playing in this era, he surely would have had a washboard ab and pecs to flaunt.

Unlike Dravid, Rahul’s limited-over utility was seldom ever disputed, though there’s a circulating belief that he’s a bit undercut batting down the order, and considered redundant in the top-order with the riches India possess. He harboured a similar dilemma before his Test debut. “He was slightly worried about batting in the middle order. But I told him to be patient and his opportunity will arrive sooner than later,” Jayaraj remembers. It came straightaway, in the second Test.

Rahul’s limited-over appearances, like his IPL excursions, had been scattered. From his ODI debut in June 2016, he was presented with just nine more games; he’s played T20Is more regularly, but down the order, from where he even rattled out a hundred off only 51 balls against the West Indies.

Similarly in IPL, he has had two desperate stints with the RCB alone, between a two-year liberative spell at Sunrisers Hyderabad. This year, he was reckoned dispensable enough to go unretained, and RCB were made to repent that.

Jayaraj, without a scintilla of doubt, believes he can reprise the success in ODIs too, before the World Cup next year. “I have a feeling that this could be his breakout year in ODIs too,” he says.

A breakout year with that high, front elbow winking sparklingly at the distant stars, and unearthing cricket tragics from sleepy, ageing men.

V, inverted V: The strokes that have embellished Rahul’s IPL spring

Cover drive: His favourite stroke, he hasn’t missed any opportunity to unleash his cover drives, both the conventional and lofted ones, which he manages with an extension of his front elbow. The critical aspect of the stroke is that he seldom reaches out for it, rather waits for the ball.

Straight drive: Several modern-day batsmen prefer to clump the straight drives, with hardly any flourish. Rahul does it in more conventional fashion, a full-bloodied swing meeting the ball with a copybook flourish, flaunting of course, the pronounced front elbow.

Pull: The most non-violent executioner of the shot, he waits for the ball and glides than pulls it behind square. Rahul always had the shot in his kitty, but was inexplicably reluctant hitherto. He has shed that reluctance recently.

Reverse sweep/switch hit: Not a compulsive reverse-sweeper, but Rahul has been extremely successful with his strokes in the inverted V and has grown in confidence at the back-end of the season. A whopping 151 runs in 50 balls depicts his exceptional hitting rate and effectivity.