43 runs in the first five games, and a 101* in the next. Tilak Varma is the talk of the town for good reason, and it’s the talk with skipper, Hardik Pandya, and Rohit Sharma he’s happy to give credit to for his epic knock against the Gujarat Titans. 🙏

“Rohit bhai told me to play 15 balls. He told me everyone knows what I am capable of if I play 15 balls. He told me not to look at the situation and just play out 15 balls. That was on my mind. When I played 15 balls, the instinct came in to hit better,” he said at the pre-match press conference ahead of the game against CSK.

Another key feature during that knock was his partnership with Hardik, and it was just the pump up Tilak needed to up the ante. “Hardik bhai always backs the players. He kept telling me, ‘Tu karega’, ‘Tu karke dikhayega’. He keeps motivating the players with his energy. His captaincy is about that energy,” he said.

You peep into Tilak’s head and you see the clarity. When to hit, when to stay put, when to see it out, when to explode. In his epic 101*, it looked like he had it all calculated. ‘God’s plan’, he called it. 💪

“I know I can hit all over the ground. I have fancy shots, I can hit down the ground. Whenever the team demands staying on the wicket, or when the team needs me to score runs, I just change my gear and see which bowler I can attack. There are days when you have to give respect to bowlers, and days when you have to attack. In the beginning, I gave respect to all the bowlers.

“When Rashid Khan was bowling to me at the start, even if I thought the ball was in my range, I looked to take singles only, because the team situation demanded that I stay out there in the middle. I just called it, ‘God’s plan’. When I looked to hit, the shots came out well and it came my way at the end of the day.” 💙