Whether you are right wing, left wing or Popatlal from C Wing, everyone is on the same page tonight, marvelling at Shadab Khan's innings. Different ideologies but same admiration. And you wonder is there anything in this world more powerful than sport?

Josh Hazlewood played his first T20 match in 2009. He was 18 years old, already 6'4", already hitting a good length like it owed him money. You would think a bowler with his height, his control, his ability to make the ball talk without saying too much, would have been everywhere in the format that was exploding around him. He was not. Between 2009 & 2020, Hazlewood played 30 T20 matches. That is less than 3 games a year across 11 long years. While batters built empires in T20s, Hazlewood watched from the sidelines, or more accurately, he did not watch at all. He was bowling in whites somewhere, taking 5 wicket hauls that nobody remembered by Monday. Then 2020 arrived. Since then, 102 T20s, 140 wickets, Economy 7.58, Strike rate 16.2. No pace bowler this decade has taken more wickets with better strike rate & economy. Not one. RCB found him in 2022. The franchise that could not defend totals. That wasted Gayle, AB, Kohli season after season because their bowlers cracked under pressure. The memes wrote themselves. Hazlewood changed that immediately. 20 wickets in 12 games in his first seasoj for him in 2022. He just landed the ball where he wanted, again & again, until batters ran out of ideas. Then he disappeared. Only 3 games in 2023 & missed entire 2024 season. But the universe, or perhaps RCB's scouting team, had a plan. They paired him with Bhuvneshwar Kumar. Another man who started in 2009. Unlike Hazlewood, Bhuvi had played everywhere. Proved himself for multiple teams. Survived the format's evolution while Hazlewood was locked out of it. Two veterans. Two men who should have been finished. Two men who instead decided to make life miserable for batters in the era of impact players & 220 plus scores. From 2025, they sit one & two for most powerplay wickets in IPL. Bhuvi with 15, Hazlewood with 14. They are not young. Not too fast in the modern sense. They just know where the stumps & what is the perfect line. And they keep hitting them. Here is the lingering shame. Hazlewood has played only 44 IPL games. For a bowler of his quality, that number is almost offensive. Yet out of those 32 games made him RCB's most successful overseas bowler in 19 years. 52 wickets in just 32 games. The math is embarrassing for everyone who wore that jersey before him. RCB will want him to reach 100 wickets. They should. He owes them nothing, but they owe him everything. The man the 2010s forgot is now the bowler the 2020s cannot ignore. And if he keeps going at this rate, the next decade might finally give him the credit he should have had all along.