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Coming in at the crease when Titans new-ball operator Kagiso Rabada was breathing fire and cranking up the speedometer with his thunderbolts, Tilak commenced his knock by nudging around for ones and twos and playing the odd dot ball, but crucially steadying the ship along with Naman Dhir to bring a semblance of calm to the Mumbai Indians innings. His innings was composed of two parts — the first 22 balls yielded only 19 runs, without a single hit to the fence. The rest of the innings was a blur of fours and sixes, an exhibition of unstoppable power hitting.
Tilak’s childhood coach, Salam Bayash reflected on the slight changes the batter has made to his game. “I told him to spend some time at the crease before going for shots and also to cut down on the reverse sweep and play straight. The pitch wasn’t that easy to bat on and the Titans’ attack was a good one. I’m happy with his century. He played no reverse sweeps. Almost all his shots were either straight or played square,” Bayash said.
Even the opposition was left in awe. Gujarat batting coach Matthew Hayden, in particular, was left gushing. “It was visible that the pitch had cracks, it was up and down. All credit to Tilak Varma, who put in a wonderful performance from 46/3. I once spoke to a fisherman and asked him a question about longevity in his life and in his career, and he said that when there’s plenty of fish around, everyone catches fish. But what he (Varma) did was that he caught fish when no one else was catching fish,” the former Australian opener said.
“We all know MI are a dangerous side. They’re notorious starters. As an opposition side, we knew that and we blinked. And when you blink against a world-class player like Tilak Varma, even on a wicket that’s kind of spicy, that leads to your downfall. We couldn’t really retract the negative momentum that was going our way because of the performance that we saw,” Hayden said.
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