KL BASIT

Some cricketers get remembered for their worst evening forever. Doesn't matter how many good mornings follow after. KL Rahul knows that curse better than most. Every failure gets replayed, every hundred gets a but attached to it & somewhere in all that noise,he just kept turning up & batting. Since 2024 Border Gavaskar Trophy, Rahul has played 15 Tests & scored 1225 runs at 51 average. Solid numbers on paper. Except runs were never really the point of what he has been doing. He has faced 2473 balls in that time, more than any opener in world cricket during the same period. Not by a small margin either. Nobody else has even reached 2000, only 1 opener has crossed 1600. His average balls per innings sits at 91.59, more than England's two openers combined manage between them for same stretch. And he did this while India were falling apart around him a little. India lost Rohit Sharma as an opener in this window, lost Virat Kohli at 4, spent months fumbling around for a number 3. Somebody had to just stand there & take the shine off new ball while everything else around him kept shifting. In his last 20 innings he has fallen for single digits only 4 times& never twice in a row. For years white ball cricket couldn't decide what to do with him, dropped him, recalled him, dropped him again. Red ball cricket, it turns out, was patiently waiting for exactly this version of Rahul all along.