No time like the present for Patidar. The future could be even better

In the second over of the Eliminator game between LSG and RCB, Avesh Khan landed the ball on a back of a length and angled it into the right-handed Rajat Patidar. For a moment, it felt as if Patidar would look to defend with a straight blade. But he didn't. With the front foot leading the back foot and left shoulder pointing more towards the bowler, Patidar opened the bat face to tailor the gap through point as it raced away to the fence. It was a shot of class and authority. It was also a shot that signalled Patidar was about to touch a different zone with the bat in hand.

During the course of his innings, hard length or spin, Patidar was seldom hurried into playing punches, pull shots or even hitting the ball in the air. On Wednesday in Kolkata, the 28-year-old didn't just take the IPL by storm, he also made batting look pretty easy on a pitch where even some of the stalwarts of the batting game were found wanting. Chandrakant Pandit, Patidar's coach at Madhya Pradesh, though wasn't surprised.

"The quality player picks up the line and length very quickly, it is like you know he has that extra time than other players," Pandit tells Cricbuzz. "I don't want to compare with anyone but if I have to take a name... Rohit Sharma has extra time with his batting, you can talk about Virat, Sachin Tendulkar, they had that little bit of extra time to pick the line and length. Rajat does too. To play the shot through the covers off the back foot, that is not everyone can manage at that pace."

Patidar has been around the domestic cricket scene since 2015 but Pandit recalls having noticed a marked change in his protege's batting last season. After years of having been a force for his state team, the right-hander had started looking like someone who was ready for the next level.

Patidar's innings at the Eden Gardens wasn't just about how he took on LSG's heavy artillery of hit the deck pacers, but from the moment he walked out to bat, he seemed to have a clarity of thought. To capsulise the point, in IPL 2022, every single time Patidar walked out to bat at No.3 after an RCB opener was dismissed for no score, he made an impression. As Virat Kohli said to Patidar after the Eliminator game: "I felt you were very composed (when you came out to bat after the fall of the first wicket), you were very relaxed, very confident about what you can do on the pitch," as shown on IPL T20 website.

Pandit, too, chips in about Patidar's exemplary temperament. "He has got a different kind of temperament, very cool, very calm, the way he celebrated his hundred yesterday, one can judge his character. He doesn't show any excitement, he wasn't overwhelmed with that performance. Even if he gets zero or hundred, he behaves the same, that is his character."

Plaudits have been aptly showered on Patidar for his game-breaking knock against LSG. But there is another key element of his game which is perhaps not talked about much, his game awareness. To illustrate this quality of Patidar's game, Pandit turns the pages back to look back at a Ranji Trophy match played between Kerala and Madhya Pradesh where Patidar absorbed a technical point by just observing his coach's instructions from the non-striker's end.

"Jalaj Saxena was bowling off-spin, trying to bowl from outside the off-stump, trying to spin the ball from there, the way Rajat was padding him, I found it a little bit not the correct way, felt that he could get into trouble, the inside pad can drag the ball onto the stumps. So, I was standing in the dressing room and showing to others this should be the way to do padding."

"He'd seen me showing it to other boys in the dressing room from the non-striker's end. He started padding up the same way. I was surprised. When he came at Tea time, I asked him, 'how come you started doing this kind of paddling?' He said, 'you were telling other boys in the dressing room and I saw you showing them the padding technique'. The dressing room was down at the ground level and open at Rajkot. That is the quality of a good student."

Despite showing flashes of brilliance in the domestic circuit, Patidar wasn't able to take his game to the next level over a period of time. In fact, he compiled only 71 runs in IPL 2021 for RCB and subsequently remained unsold in the auction. As fate would have it, Luvnith Sisodia got injured and RCB picked Patidar as a replacement player.

Pandit notes Patidar has also worked on the mental side of things. "One has to understand a quality player can go through a lean patch. Rajat has not been recognised by everyone. Last season (IPL)... naturally his first season, in T20, you're obviously expected to hit every time, he has got that experience coming back this season, just before that hundred, we have seen a couple of innings of 30, 40, 50."

"He has realised what has to be done. He has been in touch with me, he has been talking to me, the team has so many stalwarts behind him, he is expected to go after the bowlers, if you're connecting the ball, then you must not stop or you shouldn't be trying to play 20 overs to get the runs, because Maxwell... the other batsmen are behind him and they should be given enough opportunities too. That is one of the reasons he has to bat that way. It is a team demand and one has to obviously follow that."

His childhood coach Ramkumar Atre narrates an anecdote which perhaps indicates Patidar is more of a late bloomer. "In Madhya Pradesh, we have division level. He was doing very well at the under-18 level, but when selection meetings used to happen, he used to fail. Then one season he got selected for Under-18 and directly played for Under-22."

The spellbinding innings against LSG could just help Patidar to carve out a new path and scale higher honours. And his Madhya Pradesh coach's gut-feel, that the talented batter has the potential to play across formats at a higher level, could yet turn out to be true.