Hardik — the lethal weapon in India’s white-ball armoury Premium

Hardik Pandya, a maverick all-rounder, excels in cricket with his unique blend of skills and leadership qualities.

Hardik Pandya loves a laugh. He loves laughing at himself too, a rare trait in a world where, increasingly, people take themselves too seriously. He is the maverick every team needs, a free spirit that is here, there and everywhere.

Like everyone else with an immense gift that many others feel is not being made optimum use of, Hardik will exasperate, even infuriate now and again. From the standpoint of Indian cricket, he is a rare and precious commodity – a genuine all-rounder who bowls seam-up. India have spread the net far and wide in a bid to ensnare a cricketer of this ilk, someone in the Kapil Dev mould (not the next Kapil because, of course, there can only be one Kapil) who can hold his own with the bat and with the ball, and who is an amalgam of grace, agility and athleticism on the field.

Hardik has all these traits in abundance. He is a free-flowing batter whose lithe frame effectively couches immense strength that comes from powerful forearms. His basics are strong and seldom highlighted because that is the lot of stroke-makers; without strong fundamentals, it is impossible to make meaningful runs in international cricket, never mind what the format is. Beyond the basics, he has a range of strokes that are the envy of several and even though he can score at a furious clip and hit gigantic sixes with seeming effortlessness, much of Hardik’s batting revolves around the orthodox and the conventional.

It’s his bowling, however, that excites, enthrals and exasperates in equal measure. Hardik fancies himself as an out-and-out fast bowler – his trysts with the 140 kmph-mark haven’t been merely sporadic – who is convinced he can hustle batters with raw pace. He backs his short ball, his bouncer which he feels comes on to the batter a little quicker than they expect. It’s a ball that has leaked plenty of runs, but it is also a ball that has brought him great success. How do you argue with someone who has so much faith in himself, so much belief in his abilities? How do you overlook someone of his credentials, a genuine match-winner in an Indian team replete with match-winners across the two white-ball formats?

At one point, Hardik seemed primed to fill the Kapil void that had plagued Indian cricket for more than two decades. Within a year and a half of his white-ball debut in a T20I in Australia in January 2016, Hardik was donning the white flannels in a Test match in Galle, in July 2017. He smashed a 49-ball 50 on debut to announce his arrival and, two Tests later, hammered 108 off 96 deliveries in the third Test of that series against Sri Lanka in Pallekele. Of the 86 runs he eked out for the last two wickets with ten and Jack, Mohammed Shami and Umesh Yadav respectively managed only 11 between them.

A year later in Nottingham, he picked up the first of what ought to have been several five-fors in Tests. He had a Test to remember, making 18 and 52 not out, taking five for 28 and one for 22, as India fought back after losing the first two Tests to win by a massive 203-run margin at Trent Bridge. A shame really, that he only played one Test thereafter, in Southampton two weeks later, and then faded away from the landscape of the longest format, thanks to a protesting body that wouldn’t allow him to survive the sustained rigours of the five-day game for any reasonable period of time.

Hardik is practically lost to Test cricket – he recently made it clear to the deciding authorities that the red-ball game wasn’t for him – but has loads to offer the two limited-overs setups where he has already established himself as an influential, game-changing individual. After a topsy-turvy several months when he went from India’s T20I captain-in-waiting to a captain who might never be (in a long-term, permanent capacity), Hardik is now seemingly at peace with his position in Indian cricket’s current scheme of things, where he is viewed as practically indispensable as a player but whose leadership capabilities are surplus to requirement.