Hardik Pandya loves a laugh. He loves laughing at himself too, a rare trait in a world where, increasingly, people take themselves too seriously. He is the maverick every team needs, a free spirit that is here, there and everywhere.
Like everyone else with an immense gift that many others feel is not being made optimum use of, Hardik will exasperate, even infuriate now and again. From the standpoint of Indian cricket, he is a rare and precious commodity – a genuine all-rounder who bowls seam-up. India have spread the net far and wide in a bid to ensnare a cricketer of this ilk, someone in the Kapil Dev mould (not the next Kapil because, of course, there can only be one Kapil) who can hold his own with the bat and with the ball, and who is an amalgam of grace, agility and athleticism on the field.
Hardik has all these traits in abundance. He is a free-flowing batter whose lithe frame effectively couches immense strength that comes from powerful forearms. His basics are strong and seldom highlighted because that is the lot of stroke-makers; without strong fundamentals, it is impossible to make meaningful runs in international cricket, never mind what the format is. Beyond the basics, he has a range of strokes that are the envy of several and even though he can score at a furious clip and hit gigantic sixes with seeming effortlessness, much of Hardik’s batting revolves around the orthodox and the conventional.
It’s his bowling, however, that excites, enthrals and exasperates in equal measure. Hardik fancies himself as an out-and-out fast bowler – his trysts with the 140 kmph-mark haven’t been merely sporadic – who is convinced he can hustle batters with raw pace. He backs his short ball, his bouncer which he feels comes on to the batter a little quicker than they expect. It’s a ball that has leaked plenty of runs, but it is also a ball that has brought him great success. How do you argue with someone who has so much faith in himself, so much belief in his abilities? How do you overlook someone of his credentials, a genuine match-winner in an Indian team replete with match-winners across the two white-ball formats?
The Kapil void
At one point, Hardik seemed primed to fill the Kapil void that had plagued Indian cricket for more than two decades. Within a year and a half of his white-ball debut in a T20I in Australia in January 2016, Hardik was donning the white flannels in a Test match in Galle, in July 2017. He smashed a 49-ball 50 on debut to announce his arrival and, two Tests later, hammered 108 off 96 deliveries in the third Test of that series against Sri Lanka in Pallekele. Of the 86 runs he eked out for the last two wickets with ten and Jack, Mohammed Shami and Umesh Yadav respectively managed only 11 between them.
A year later in Nottingham, he picked up the first of what ought to have been several five-fors in Tests. He had a Test to remember, making 18 and 52 not out, taking five for 28 and one for 22, as India fought back after losing the first two Tests to win by a massive 203-run margin at Trent Bridge. A shame really, that he only played one Test thereafter, in Southampton two weeks later, and then faded away from the landscape of the longest format, thanks to a protesting body that wouldn’t allow him to survive the sustained rigours of the five-day game for any reasonable period of time.
Hardik is practically lost to Test cricket – he recently made it clear to the deciding authorities that the red-ball game wasn’t for him – but has loads to offer the two limited-overs setups where he has already established himself as an influential, game-changing individual. After a topsy-turvy several months when he went from India’s T20I captain-in-waiting to a captain who might never be (in a long-term, permanent capacity), Hardik is now seemingly at peace with his position in Indian cricket’s current scheme of things, where he is viewed as practically indispensable as a player but whose leadership capabilities are surplus to requirement.
What ought to have been a period of great promise and potential will have to be identified as the seminal turning point yet in Hardik’s career. After two years helming Gujarat Titans on their entry into the Indian Premier League, Hardik moved to Mumbai Indians for Season 17 in 2024. It ought to have been a seamless return of the Prodigal Son. It was with Mumbai Indians that he first came into public consciousness, like Jasprit Bumrah, thanks to the eagle scouting eye of John Wright. It was there that he shot into prominence, made a name for himself, helped them to titles in 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2020. If he left MI for a debutant franchise in 2022, it was to further his leadership aspirations, and there was nothing wrong with that.
With Gujarat, Hardik was phenomenal as batter and as captain/leader, even though he didn’t bowl as much as previously. In the first year, he hauled them all the way to the promised land while in 2023, it needed a four off the final ball of the title clash for Ravindra Jadeja to swing the match Chennai Super Kings’ way. Hardik had shown himself to be an able leader of men and taken charge of the Indian T20I team, specifically, in the time that Rohit Sharma sat out the format in the immediacy of the T20 World Cup in Australia in November 2022. From all indications, he would succeed Rohit as the Indian T20I captain, to start with, whenever Rohit decided to step away.
But Hardik’s return to MI – as captain, no less – queered the pitch. He was received with loud boos as the Mumbai crowd made no secret of its displeasure at popular captain Rohit being given the heave-ho without so much as a thank you despite masterminding five title-winning campaigns. It wasn’t Hardik’s fault that he entertained aspirations of leading a high-profile franchise where he cut his teeth as a competitive cricketer, but the lack of transparency in the transition process infuriated the followers, who turned on the new skipper and held him up as the villain of the piece.
Booed at the Wankhede and booed at Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi Stadium, the base of the Titans, Hardik would have felt the world was against him, but he put on a brave face and got on with the job. After all, he had stared adversity in the face more than once and refused to blink, so why should this be any different?
One of the lowest points of Hardik’s professional career came at the 2023 World Cup, which he began as among the few players capable of influencing the outcome of the tournament. His all-round skills gave India the great luxury of playing an additional pacer, or spinner, or batter, depending on the conditions. For the first three games, he was efficient without being explosive because he hardly got a chance to be that. Then, in match four against Bangladesh in Pune, he injured himself while trying to field a ball off his own bowling, an injury that ended his interest in the tournament.
Hardik did recover in time for the IPL, where he had a disastrous run as batter and captain. Rumours started to surface of a distance between him and Rohit, which wasn’t ideal from Indian cricket’s point of view, given that Rohit was the captain and Hardik his deputy at the 2024 T20 World Cup. Fortunately, there wasn’t a great deal of truth to these rumours; Hardik was excellent in the Americas, fusing explosive batting with intelligent bowling and coming famously to the party in the crunch in the final against South Africa.
Stepping up
It was his dismissal of Heinrich Klaasen at the start of the 17th over which gave India an opening, and he himself stepped into that and completed the demolition job by accounting for David Miller and Kagiso Rabada in the last over of the title clash. A match that seemed entirely out of India’s grasp was won by seven runs, Hardik more than repaying the faith with three wickets in his last two overs the icing on a cake of munificence throughout the competition.
Rohit’s international retirement from T20s should have been the cue for Hardik to step up and assume the captaincy mantle, but that wasn’t to be.
Suryakumar Yadav, at the time the No. 1 batter in the world in that format, was entrusted with the leadership responsibility, while the elevation of Shubman Gill as Rohit’s deputy in ODIs indicates that Hardik’s captaincy aspirations must be put on hold, potentially forever. It must have come as a bitter blow to someone who has made no bones about wanting to lead the country full-time, but Hardik has been around long enough to know that that’s how the cookie crumbles sometimes and there is no point moping over something that isn’t within one’s control.
All Hardik can do now is hold his own as a cricketer, and as a leader without the tag of captain alongside him. He is now in the senior core group, and it’s incumbent upon him to shape a brighter tomorrow while ensuring that the torch of success shines benevolently on him and his colleagues today. Against Pakistan, he showed smarts and common-sense while bowling eight lovely overs for just 31 runs and two big wickets, among them Babar Azam, in a grand exhibition of the art of bowling seam-up on a sluggish track. Only the start, hopefully, of another fortune-defining run in another global competition.
Published – February 25, 2025 12:02 am IST