IPL 2023: Surya eclipses Rashid’s titanic effort. @surya_14kumar lights up Mumbai with his maiden IPL 1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ 🤩

Surya burns Titans in his scorching light, outshining a stellar solo concert by Rashid

There was no larger narrative on Friday night than Suryakumar Yadav’s glorious hundred

@surya_14kumar set the stage on fire 🔥 🔥 with his maiden IPL TON & bagged the Player of the Match award as @mipaltan beat #GT. 🙌 🙌- Sachin Tendulkar

Yadav has a lexicon of himself, rather a dialect that whirrs the ears of the hapless bowlers. Thrice he played the shot, but it was the six off Alzarri Joseph that captured the essence of it. The length was not quite full, the ball was angling in from outside the off-stump—in another mood, he could have whipped it over mid-wicket.

But here, he hung back, met the ball on the bounce and lifted him over long-off, the high front-elbow winking skywards and the front-foot hopping just after he had struck the ball. The whole weight is on the back-foot, and the hop is a byproduct of him transferring his weight onto the shot.

The dazzle of Yadav’s array of improvised strokes behind the stumps leaves you blind to the grandeur of his stroke-making in front of the stumps.

He offered a peep into this dimension of his game, as though he wanted to display the more classical side of his on yet another true-bounced surface where he could play through the line and on the rise, besides nullifying the dangers of Rashid Khan with sweeps, which not surprisingly was his most productive strokes (23).

It’s not the line of the bowling, the nature of the pitch or the placement of fields that seems to dictate his scoring strokes. But pure whim, as though he woke up this fine morning and decided that this was his day to hit boundaries down the ground.

Few other batsmen have dealt Rashid with as much authority as Yadav. He would bend really low, get his front-pad outside the line of the off-stump and sweep him hard and low behind the square.

Rashid had just dismissed Rohit Sharma and Ishan Kishan after a breezy first wicket stand of 61 runs, but just the second ball he faced off the leg-spinner he swept him for a four.