At 37, in his first full Tamil Nadu Premier League (TNPL) season, R Ashwin is expanding his range as a batter. He has always been good at finding boundaries down the ground, a skill that Rajasthan Royals leverage when they send him up the order in the IPL in order to provide their finishers a more suitable point of entry. But at this year's TNPL, Ashwin has been working on playing boundary shots square of the wicket, and it's paying off.
In the Qualifier 2, against Idream Tiruppur Tamizhans at Chepauk on Friday, Ashwin dismantled left-arm fingerspinners R Sai Kishore and S Ajith Ram with a number of reverse sweeps. He was particularly severe on Sai Kishore, scoring 28 off nine balls at a strike rate of over 300. In all, Ashwin has 200 runs in eight innings in this TNPL at a strike rate of 166.66, with five of those innings coming right at the top or No. 3 for Dindigul Dragons.
"Look, everything is work in progress, right?," he said on the eve of the TNPL final against Shahrukh Khan's Lyca Kovai Kings in Chennai. "You can even ask Shahrukh Khan about it. How does he do power-hitting… how do you hit the ball through the off side and leg side? It's all about repetitions, and understanding angles and triggers.
"Obviously, in the last IPL, I felt like I needed to widen my game and widen my horizons square of the wicket because I know I can hit the ball down the ground, and I can use my feet. Do I want to explore other options is something I had to ask myself. So if I can ask that question and if I can find an answer, it gives me a new avenue to explore and keep myself interested in the game."
Dindigul's rookie left-arm fingerspinner P Vignesh had missed the Under-19 World Cup cut for India earlier this year but has been particularly impressive with his accuracy and control in this TNPL. In Qualifier 2 against Tiruppur, he came away with figures of 3 for 8 and the Player-of-the-Match award. Like Vignesh, Tiruppur's offspin-bowling allrounder Mohamed Ali was excluded from India's Under-19 World Cup squad but has made a mark in the TNPL. Ashwin has urged the next generation of cricketers to embrace setbacks and keep upgrading their skills.
"Look, firstly I think missing the Under-19 cut is not the end of the world. Looking at how fragile our next generation can be, I really urge people to look at this game as a part of life," Ashwin said. "Failure and success is very, very normal, and people become better only through failures. So I know P Vignesh, he has been coming to the Indian team nets, and I think he has improved every day. And this sort of a tournament gives these guys opportunity to be able to express and expand their game. I really hope that they're ready to expand it constantly, and find answers to the questions that are going to be asked."
Shahrukh: GT helped improve my game against spin
Shahrukh has often struggled against spin, especially at the start of his innings, but he has been working on a technical tweak - a trigger movement where he pushes his weight forward - and he believes this will help him be a more rounded batter.
"When I was with the Gujarat Titans, we had a camp for about a couple of months there, so I started working a lot on my spin game because they wanted me to bat up the order," Shahrukh said. "And when you bat up the order, obviously for a batter like me having my concerns against spin bowling, especially, opponent teams would bring in spin when I come out to bat.
"So their role was to help me improve my spin game, and it really helped. The front press I'm doing [in the TNPL] is quite obvious now, and it has helped me to score off the front foot and off the back foot as well."
While Shahrukh's overall strike rate against pace in the IPL is 161.11, it falls sharply to 112 against spin. But in IPL 2024, he managed to lift his strike rate against spin to 168.75 while maintaining a similarly high strike rate against pace. And when Kovai met Dindigul in the league phase in Tirunelveli, Shahrukh took on mystery spinner Varun Chakravarthy and left-arm spinner Vignesh on his way to an unbeaten 51 off 25 balls.
Having lost that game to Dindigul, Shahrukh has called his team to put together their "best cricket" in their quest for a three-peat in the TNPL.
"I really don't know [about the law of averages]. We're taking it as just another game," Shahrukh said. "The law of averages and the hat-trick [of titles]… all these things on social media are there, but we aren't focusing on that. Out of the eight games we've played, only in two games we've stepped up to the expectations we have as a unit.
"I hope even in this game we try and bring it out. As far as I'm concerned, we still haven't played our best cricket this year, and we will try and do that."