Accelerator, brake and Harshit Rana
The 60,000 people in Eden Gardens will remember that on Saturday, March 23 2024, Harshit Rana became the first player ever to defeat Pat Cummins.
This is a man who completed cricket in 2023 by winning everything the ICC has to offer and has since been doing side-quests by changing Test matches with bat and ball, exactly and precisely when his team needs him the most.
That's what SunRisers Hyderabad paid ₹ 20.50 crore for. It wasn't for his bowling, batting, captaincy or the good looks. It was for bringing that winning charm, where you see him walk out and know he would manage to chase eight runs off one ball.
On Saturday he needed to chase four. The stage was set. Play one good shot at your noisy opponent's home, kill their campaign and begin your own. But he missed. He missed because Harshit out-thought him and bowled a 110.5 kph slower one, that just sneaked under his big swing over deep mid-wicket.
It was the equivalent to taking a panenka against Manuel Neuer with penalities tied. It is the easiest kick to hit but the most difficult to convince yourself to take.
That wasn't the only miracle. On the previous ball, he got Heinrich Klaasen out. The South African was batting on 63 (28) after smashing Mitchell Starc for 19 runs in the previous over which singlehandedly pushed SRH's win probability to 82% from just 0.85% at the end of the 16th over.
After seeing him bat in the SA20 and the World Cup, you'd know by now that when those fist-pumps start coming alongside his self-cursing and a red face, he wins it. He wins games no matter the situation which, with Suryakumar Yadav injured for a long time now, makes him undebatably the best T20 batter in the world.
"My heartbeats were obviously very fast because there was a lot of expectations of the fans but not too many runs to defend," Harshit said after the match in an IPL video. "I knew, either the match would get over on that ball or if my plan was successful, the match would go deep," he added.
It was all part of a big comeback. Harshit was hit for a six on the first ball of the over, which meant SRH needed just seven runs off five balls. The next five balls were all off-cutters bowled at different lengths with an attempt to keep them away from the batters.
Klaasen was forced to take a single on the second and the belligerent Shahbaz Ahmed holed out to long-on on the third before Marco Jansen was kept down to a single too. The fifth ball was almost identical to the one Cummins got and Klaasen finally top-edged his slog for Suyash Sharma to take a stunner at third man.
"Harshit Rana told me that he wanted the last over" - Andre Russell
After the match, Ramandeep Singh said that the slower-one plot was a last minute thing that came straight from the dressing room.
Skipper Shreyas Iyer said that Harshit felt the nerves after the first six and he had to tell the youngster that it was his moment to become the hero. But it was Andre Russell, who won the Player of the Match for his first-innings heroics, whose comments shed the best light on the man of the moment.
"His body language was on point in that last over," Russell said about Harshit. "He wanted the ball, and that is the body language we all need as professionals. If he was shying away from it, maybe it would have gone away. He told me that he wanted the last over, he claimed it, and delivered for us. With the first ball going for six, [you can] still have a little doubt there, but he came back strong and got the job done."
It was also Harshit who kickstarted things for KKR. When Starc conceded 12 off his first over, he let go just five runs in the next, also creating a LBW chance which was overturned. In his second over, he got Mayank Agarwal to miscue a pull but Ramandeep Singh dropped a difficult chance at deep square leg.
Iyer backed him for another over and he cramped the same batter in identical fashion, this time for Rinku Singh to grab it nicely. Harshit let out all the built-up frustration with a flying kiss right at Mayank's face and a stare - which made him lose 60% of his match fees in the process - but fired KKR up.
The credit of the win also goes to the kind of acceleration new joiness Phil Salt and Ramandeep provided with the bat in the first 10 overs, and to the way Sunil Narine applied the brakes on the SRH innings with a boundary-less spell.
But at the end, Cummins' fairytale, Klaasen's destiny and SRH's all-out effort to get back to their glory days -- all came crashing down in front of a slightly arrogant and immensely clutch boy from Delhi who had the backing of Eden's hubbub. Even Gautam Gambhir himself couldn't have written a better comeback script.