Jitendra Singh, Krunal Pandya‘s childhood coach, watched his player go down on one knee against Will Jacks in the ninth over on Sunday and pick up a boundary through deep square leg. He had seen that shot hundreds of times in the nets. He had built it, piece by piece, over six months.
“Grip, head, and a lot of mechanics, alignment, and many other things,” Singh said. “It was not just one thing. Everything was sequenced into one process.”
That process was on display at Raipur, where Pandya’s 73 off 46 balls played a central role in RCB’s two-wicket win over Mumbai Indians. The innings was built, largely, on one shot.
The sweep is not a new weapon for Pandya. But at 35, with specific work put into its mechanics before this IPL season, it has become something more deliberate — a way to take control of a middle-overs innings without needing to manufacture power from scratch each time.
“We had worked for the last six months on this aspect of his batting,” Singh said. “Especially a week to 10 days before he left for this season. We worked at the Reliance IPCL ground and at the Kotambi stadium.”
What they worked on was the head. “We tried to make sure his head stays a little more over the ball when he is about to play the sweep shot,” Singh said. “So that is helping him to generate more power and get into a better position to execute the shots.” He was specific about what that meant in practice.
“Grip, head position, how the hand has to move — technical aspects were all there. We worked on how the positioning of the head has to be so he can generate more power. Everything was sequenced into one process and that is helping him get into a better position to execute.”
The head is everything on the sweep. Get across early, go down with intent, read the length quickly — and the lbw risk dissolves. The hands free up. The shot cleans itself. Part of why it keeps working is the strong bottom hand behind it — even a mistimed sweep often finds a gap or clears an infielder, which keeps the bowler second-guessing.
The pattern holds across all three. Spinners brought on to tighten the middle overs, Pandya using the sweep to take back the initiative. Once it starts working, it forces captains to push boundary riders deeper and wider. That opens space straight and through the covers. Bowling plans shift. The game changes shape.
Much of Pandya’s IPL career has been spent in brief cameos — a consequence of playing in teams built around dominant top orders. These innings tell a different story. When he gets time in the middle, he knows how to build, how to rotate, how to keep the innings moving without forcing. On Sunday he did exactly that — singles when boundaries were hard to come by, ensuring the asking rate never climbed away from RCB.