Synopsis: Sai Sudharsan revels in the festival of pace bowlers in GT’s leap to top spot.
In an edition bossed by batsmen, seamers got a kiss of life at Ahmedabad on Tuesday. On a surface where the new ball swung and seamed, the older one stuck and stopped, Gujarat Titans’ high-class retinue of seamers consigned Sunrisers Hyderabad to an 82-run defeat defending 168, and leapt to the top of the table, almost sealing a playoff spot. Fifteen wickets fell, runs trickled at 7.3 runs an over, just eight sixes were hit. But all these numbers merely underlined the significance of Sai Sudharsan’s 44-ball 61.
Sudharsan, the roundhead
Amongst a deluge of cavalier openers, Sudharsan is an anomalous roundhead. Most of his brethren, especially his left-handed opening brethren, wield a strike rate in excess of 200. The 15-year-old wunderkind Vaibhav Sooryavanshi hits at 236; Abhishek Sharma blisters at 2019.13; Priyansh Arya 226. Sudharsan’s hitting rate is an old-worldly 155.1. But the Orange Cap (501 runs) sits snugly on his crown and more significantly, he is capping tournament-defining victories for the Titans.
There were times when he could have responded like a staple T20 opener. That is to go for his strokes, even if wickets were falling at the other end. Like Abhishek and Ishan Kishan later would in the face of calamity. Sudharsan, assured of his methods and the success they would reap, chose implacable patience in a format where the word is as obsolete as an earthen stove in a modular kitchen world.
Watching Pat Cummins and his cronies seam the ball, his colleagues Shubman Gill and Jos Buttler fumbling when trying to manufacture strokes that were not there, Sudharsan wisely chose circumspection. Titans’ batting depth is shallow compared to this format’s demands, with Jason Holder slated at No.6. The Bajan owns a Test double hundred, but his long levers have shone only sporadically in this format.
Sai Sudharsan of Gujarat Titans play a shot during Match 56 of the TATA Indian Premier League 2026 between Gujarat Titans and Sunrisers Hyderabad at Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad, India, on May 12, 2026. (Photo by Surjeet Yadav / CREIMAS for IPL)
So, Sudharsan batted with purposeful calm, after Titans tumbled to 26/2. He went scoreless for five successive balls in the Powerplay; he went without a boundary for 10 deliveries. None of these ruffled him, as he quietly engineered the rescue act with Washington Sundar, with whom he stitched 69 runs from 41 balls. He waited for balls in his self-contained arc. When Eshan Malinga strayed a touch wide, he made room to cut square of deep backward point, harnessing his pace for momentum. He then uncorked a gorgeous lofted cover drive, on the rise, off Sakib Hussain. Sudharsan held the pose to emphasise his supreme balance and poise.
He spread the canvas for Washington to splash colourful strokes in the death overs. The tall all-rounder, in his batting enforcer avatar, creamed 16 runs in the 19th over and completed a 33-ball 50 to ensure Titans put up a competitive total on a teasing surface In the end, the runs proved way too many for Sunrisers, who wished they had a composed roundhead like Sudharsan.
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Festival of seam merchants
The cast of Test-class bowlers in the game was enviable. Kagiso Rabada and Pat Cummins are two-thirds of the holy fast-bowling trinity (along with Jasprit Bumrah) of this era. Mohammed Siraj, Prasidh Krishna and Jason Holder are probably a rung below, but guileful seamers themselves. The Ahmedabad curator bestowed a surface with movement with the new ball plus a bit of uneven bounce. They simply revelled.
Siraj’s first over was pure theatre. He swung the ball both ways, had Travis Head poking and hopping before he snared him with an in-swinger on leg-stump, which the Australian tried to work away fatally, managing only a chunky leading edge.
But Sunrisers were hell bent on repelling fire with fire. Abhishek skinned Radada into the stands on the first ball he faced. But the South African exacted revenge two balls later, by following him when he backed away to manufacture room to free his arms. The ball cannoned onto his glove and dribbled onto the stumps.
Kagiso Rabada of Gujarat Titans celebrates the wicket of Ishan Kishan of Sunrisers Hyderabad during Match 56. (Photo by Surjeet Yadav / CREIMAS for IPL)
But Sunrisers did not learn. Kishan, tentative to Rabada’s wiles, tried to glide him over the wicketkeeper. The ball was not only rapid but swung away a touch to fox Kishan. At 23 for 3, the lone ray of hope was Heinrich Klaasen. But Holder coaxed a leading edge off him to stub out Sunrisers’ hopes.
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Before them, Cummins had offered a glimpse of the challenges that awaited batsmen. His methods were spectacularly simple. The Aussie imprisoned batsmen with his suffocating lines, on the off-stump or thereabouts, angling a shade away, or straightening after pitching. He subtly modulated his lengths, oscillating from hard to full, blasting the yorker with as indecipherable disguise as a fiendish bouncer. His two-over burst for eight runs stifled Titans, and he ended the night with figures of 4-0-20-1. But he had neither the support cast of Rabada nor a batsman of Sudharsan’s make in his side.
Brief Scores: Gujarat Titans 168/5 in 20 overs (Sudharsan 61, Washington 50; Hinge 2/17) beat SRH 86 all out in 14.5 overs (Cummins 19; Holder 3/20, Rabada 3/28) by 82 runs.
