Sudharsan has taken his T20 game to a new level, mixing consistency with explosion.
When Sai Sudharsan entered the IPL scene, the talent was immediately palpable. Despite being a traditional batter with a low-risk approach, Sudharsan has aced the T20 format, batting with better consistency than T20 specialists while maintaining the same strike rate.
However, one major miss in his game in the first few seasons was power-hitting, especially against the pacers. He was still hitting them well, but that ability to generate enough power off shorter-length deliveries could have been a concern in the long run.
But this season has seen an encouraging rise in that aspect, and Sudharsan’s pace game has surged to a whole new level. While his strike rate against pacers in IPL 2023 and 2024 was 148.70 and 129.33, respectively, this season’s strike rate against speedsters has been a whopping 157.60.
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When Sai Sudharsan travelled to Australia with India A last year, he linked with power-hitting coach Shannon Young to work on his pace and T20 game in general. Young has worked previously with players like Glenn Maxwell, Marnus Labuschagne, Babar Azam, and Jake Fraser-McGurk and owns a Cricket Performance Lab in Melbourne.
In the Times of India, Young explained that he didn’t do much technical work with Sudharsan and instead discussed using the ground better. He stated that the power hitting is more about the momentum generated from the body.
“We didn’t do a whole lot technically with him. We talked about how he uses the ground. We have a balance plate here that, as part of the bat fitting process, allows us to understand how much force goes through the ground. So when you understand the science of power hitting, a lot of it is about how much momentum we generate with the body.”
Shannon gave the example of a spring that reverts to its original position after you take the foot off it. Similarly, the power that is stored before hitting the ball is the same that is transferred at the point of contact.
“So the analogy I use is, ‘Imagine a spring. If you stand on a spring and then take your foot off the spring, what happens to the spring? It will bounce.’ Now that is because that spring has stored energy. When you take your foot off the spring, it reverts back to its normal state, but uses that energy, and the energy is what drives that spring off the ground. So, power hitting is very similar; the energy we store in our body before we get to the point of contact is the energy that gets transferred through the ball at the point of contact.”
Barring working on Sai Sudharsan’s game, Shannon’s lab modified his bats and made all of them equal. He revealed that his team captured a lot of data and picked the best-performing bat, only to make others of the same dimension and weight.
“What happened was when Sai came in and he hit with all his bats, and we measured his exit velocity, his launch angle, how much ground force he had, his bat velocity, backlift angles. We captured heaps of data, and we went through the five bats and then showed him the data of the one that actually performed the best. Then we took the other four bats and made them exactly the same as the one that performed the best.”
The work done is clearly visible, and the data suggests the same. In 2023, Sudharsan’s strike rate against back-of-a-length deliveries was 121.6 and 135.7 against short-length deliveries.
Then, in 2024, the strike rate on back-of-a-length and short deliveries was 120.3 and 141, respectively. However, that strike rate has surged to 157 against back-of-a-length and 195.5 against short deliveries this year.
The productivity in cut and pull shots, go-to strokes against speedsters, has been higher than in previous years. In 2023, Sudharsan struck at 109.09 and had control of 68.18% on cut shots, while having a strike rate of 185.71 and a 50% control on pull shots.
In 2024, he struck at 170.58 and had a control of 70.58% on cut shots, while striking at 159.38 with a control of 68.75% on pull shots. However, he has a strike rate of 209.67 and a control of 77.41% on cut shots, while a strike rate of 223.08 and a control of 76.92% on pull shots this year.
This was the only loophole in his armour, and now that he has worked on it, Sudharsan will be unstoppable. He has taken his T20 game to a new level, mixing consistency with explosion to form a combination like never before.
Stats Credit: Himanish Ganjoo’s tool
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