The single is cricket’s most humble gift for a batter; it can also be most humbling. Let’s never underestimate the power of the single.

The difference between 100 and 99 is just one run, but try telling that to a batter who has just been dismissed, tantalisingly close to the three-figure mark. Ninety-nine might be romanticised for the one run that got away but every batter worth his salt would rather take the pragmatic (the hundred, of course) over the romantic.

The difference between 1 and zero is also just one run. No matter how many runs one might have scored in the past, to get off the dreaded nought is the first objective of any batter, at any level. There is a sense of relief at having avoided the duck that can’t be quantified in words, though everyone who has ever held a bat will readily relate to what we are seeking to say.

When the modest single can hold such tremendous significance, where do we place the 90s? Once the ‘nervous nineties’ but no longer so, it would seem, because cricketing goalposts have shifted. Even though the sport will continue to be driven and dictated by numbers, those numbers seem to have veered away from traditional parameters such as fifties, hundreds and averages, especially when it comes to limited-overs cricket and particularly the T20 format where efficacy is decided less by averages and more by strike-rates.

There have been two extraordinary 90s on the first two playoff nights of IPL 2026, both in winning causes, both produced at breakneck pace, both knocking the stuffing out of the opposition. Delivered by exceptionally popular individuals.

Rajat Patidar unleashed the first of those essays, in the mountains of Dharamsala in Tuesday’s Qualifier 1. Last year, Patidar emerged as a surprise choice to succeed Faf du Plessis as Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s captain. The man from Indore didn’t have a great deal of captaincy experience at the senior level but the management group at the Bengaluru franchise was convinced he had the leadership and man-management skills required to drive the side to a much-awaited maiden crown.

Patidar took perhaps even himself by surprise by doing precisely that. Fears that he would be a captain only in name and that the strings would be pulled by other quarters proved singularly unfounded. Patidar showed that aggression need not manifest itself only through body language and antics. He also revealed the steel the RCB management had identified in him, running a tight ship and making sure that the cares of captaincy didn’t affect his batting too adversely. His numbers weren’t spectacular – 312 runs in 14 innings, strike-rate 143.77 – but they were more than passable, though even if he had made a million runs, they would have been eclipsed by the incandescent afterglow triggered by the end of a seemingly endless wait.

Greater scrutiny

In all sport, there is greater scrutiny on the second season – the second season as a player, as a team, as a leader in this instance. Patidar has comprehensively passed the litmus second-season test, ramping up the aggression in his batting by several notches, becoming more expressive and independent as a leader and muscling his team to a second successive final.

Unlike last year when he rode piggyback on Virat Kohli and Phil Salt’s exploits at the top of the order and from weighty middle-order contributions from Devdutt Padikkal, Jitesh Sharma and the powerful Tim David, Patidar has been at the vanguard of Bengaluru’s vaunted ‘Play Bold’ philosophy. Only Kohli (600) has more runs for the team than Patidar, whose 486 runs have come at a frenetic strike-rate of 196.76. He has smacked 41 sixes, only behind teen phenom Vaibhav Sooryavanshi and Abhishek Sharma (43). All other things being equal, Patidar should go past Abhishek in Sunday’s final though he won’t go anywhere near runaway train Sooryavanshi, who has an incredible 65 sixes to his name.

The 90 – 93 not out, to be precise -- we referred to earlier in the piece came in Qualifier 1, against Gujarat Titans who, inarguably, possess the most potent bowling attack of the competition. It was on the back of this attack – Kagiso Rabada, Mohammed Siraj, Prasidh Krishna, Jason Holder and Rashid Khan, wow – that Shubman Gill hoped to make inroads into the powerful Bengaluru batting, but his plans were dashed by Kohli and Padikkal, who added 72 for the second wicket in just 38 deliveries.

Patidar strode in when Kohli chopped Holder on to his stumps, 93 for 2 after 8.2 overs; two deliveries later, he saw Padikkal disappear, caught behind. At 94 for 3, Bengaluru were in a spot, Gujarat threatening to push back, when Patidar counter-attacked with a ferocity that rocked the 2022 champions. Patidar has the not-unfounded reputation of being a slayer of spin which he lived up to, but by his own admission, he relishes pace on the ball. He took and destroyed the Gujarat fast bowlers, sparing no one and no part of the ground; the most stunning of his nine sixes was a backfoot drive off Rabada that screamed over wide long-off for the most glorious spectacle of a night full of glorious spectacles.

When the final ball was bowled, Patidar was at the non-striker’s end, spent but exhilarated, having pummelled 93 from just 33 deliveries. With two balls left in the last over from Prasidh, he was on 92 and on target for a second IPL century but that didn’t eventuate. Never mind. This 93* was every bit worth a hundred, catapulting his side to 254 for five, a commanding 92 runs beyond Gujarat’s reach.

Twenty-four hours later, in the first of the designated knockout games of the tournament, a young boy with the world at his feet unleashed such mayhem that even Patidar’s furious knock appeared pedestrian by comparison. Okay, so we exaggerate. Not pedestrian – how can a strike-rate of 281.81 be classed so? – but definitely second fiddle because the said protagonist, the 15-year-old boy-child, scored at 334.48. He smashed sixes for fun, he intimidated and terrorised men twice his age and with ten times his experience, and he did so with a nonchalance that took one’s breath away.

The problem with that ploy is that if one is even slightly off the mark, punishment is instantaneous and brutal. As Pat Cummins found out in the very first over. The Australian skipper seemed to have gotten out of the first over unscathed when his last ball landed just a few inches short of a yorker. Sooryavanshi immediately pounced on it, slamming it over the bowler’s head and into the sightscreen for the first of what would turn out to be a dozen sixes.

He should not be doing this, you know? He should be sitting in the stands, or at home with his parents watching the ball on TV. He isn’t even of legal driving age, yet here he is, with a rapier for a bat, driving the best in the world ragged, driving the fans in the stands into delirium. He does so with nary an expression, almost as if he is oblivious to the fuss around him, as if he is unaware of the special gift that has been bestowed upon him. He does 15-year-old things, but also with a maturity way beyond someone of his age. With panache and style, but also with a certain humility that is a reflection of his upbringing as well as the access to the wisdom he has already had in his short career in the form of coaches such as Rahul Dravid (at Rajasthan Royals) and VVS Laxman (at India Under-19).

There was a sense of deja vu as Sooryavanashi lay into the Hyderabad bowling on Wednesday night. One felt one had seen all this before – which we all have, of course – but one also wanted more. Much more.

To expect so much from someone so young is beyond unfair but remarkably, magically, miraculously, Sooryavanshi is a source that keeps giving. Giving entertainment, sure, but also joy and exhilaration. His free spirit is infectious and if you find yourself smiling at several of the audacious strokes cascading off his willow, rest assured that you are not alone in doing so.

Breathtakingly irreverent

His onslaught on Cummins in the third over was breathtakingly irreverent. Here was one of the greatest fast bowlers of all time, reduced to bowling in hope more than conviction, aware that anything less than the most perfect execution would come at a massive cost. To bowl with that much pressure can make even the most seasoned blanch. Cummins must have experienced a humbling feeling on which he can share notes with other virtuosos, including his compatriots Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc.

As Sooryavanshi went through the gears and breezed past landmarks, thousands at the ground and millions sitting in their living rooms, in clubs and pubs and bars, egged him on. We were firmly in his corner as he waltzed past Gayle’s 59 sixes, we cheered as he catapulted into the 90s. When he reached 97 off 28, we knew he was one boundary away from upending the Jamaican legend as the maker of the fastest IPL hundred. Gayle had taken 30 deliveries, in 2012; how fitting it would have been had Sooryavanshi got there in 29 because hey, is there a more natural successor?

In the end, it wasn’t to be. Sooryavanshi was caught at third man to collective groans; he took an eternity to drag him off the park, not just because he had missed out on a hundred but because he didn’t help the team’s cause more. As if. “My hundreds will come,” he would say later, sagely, with a 15-year-old’s dazzling smile, “but I was more intent on contributing more for my side.” Like GR Vishwanath’s unbeaten knock of the same numerical magnitude against West Indies in the Chennai Test of 1975, this was a 97 that trumped a hundred. Effortlessly.