Saha's intent burns brightest on openers' day out

When you talk about Wriddhiman Saha, there's always the danger that you'll end up talking about who and what he isn't. He spent most of his 20s not being MS Dhoni, and much of his 30s not being Rishabh Pant. And in the way he bats in T20s, all intent and no fear of losing his wicket, you could build the case that Saha isn't Virat Kohli or KL Rahul or most other Indian openers.

With all this it can become difficult to zero in on who and what Saha is.

On Sunday, the four openers who featured in Gujarat Titans' clash with Lucknow Super Giants in Ahmedabad scored a total of 293 runs, an IPL record. Shubman Gill, Quinton de Kock and Kyle Mayers made significant contributions too, but Saha perhaps played the innings of the match - ESPNcricinfo's Impact ratings certainly thought so - and in doing so reminded the world of his considerable gifts of feet, eye and hands.

There was a moment, for instance, when Saha charged Avesh Khan, and the bowler saw him coming and went short at his body. Saha read the length in a flash and swivelled on his back foot to swat the ball to the backward square leg boundary.

There was another pull soon after, off Mohsin Khan, and this time Saha had to fetch the ball from well outside off stump and work against the left-armer's angle. He hit this even better, clearing the boundary in front of square.

A short ball designed to cramp him for room, another designed to make him reach for the ball and potentially lose his shape, and Saha had put them both away, clinically.

It shouldn't surprise you, then, that Saha sits among the top five run-getters from the pull and hook off fast bowlers since IPL 2022. He doesn't score as quickly as the other four in that list, but it might interest you to know that his strike rate while pulling and hooking is marginally better than that of his opening partner Gill (187.03), a batter who looks like he was born to pull fast bowlers.

When Saha bats, he looks like, well, what he is: a wicketkeeper-batter of the old school. Most wicketkeepers look like top-order batters now, but this wasn't always the case, and in Saha there is an echo of the quirkiness of Alan Knott or Ian Healy, who often made tough runs against high-quality bowling but never looked anything other than wicketkeeperly while doing so.

Even the prettiest of Saha's shots on Sunday had this flavour: he caressed Mohsin for an effortless four between mid-off and extra-cover in the first over of Titans' innings, but he didn't hold his pose like Gill might've. Instead, his feet began an involuntary scamper to the other end before he realised there was no need to run.

Unless his team is chasing a small target, Saha's batting in the IPL is driven by the need to maximise the powerplay field restrictions, and score as quickly as he possibly can in this phase, by any means necessary. And this means he'll often look in less control than the batter at the other end - particularly if it happens to be Gill - with a decent chunk of his runs coming off balls sliced over the infield or dragged into the leg side off the inside half of the bat.

He bats this way not because he's selfless, but because he's pragmatic; he knows it's the only way he can stay relevant in the IPL.

On days like Sunday, however, there's a lovely fluency to his ball-striking. The new ball was coming onto the bat beautifully, and a Super Giants attack short on both experience and rhythm - Mohsin, returning after shoulder surgery, was playing his second game and bowling in one for the first time since IPL 2022 - was serving up hittable balls at regular intervals.

Where other batters may have dialled down the risk-taking on such a day, reckoning that they were scoring quickly enough without needing to do anything outlandish, Saha kept playing like Saha. He kept charging the fast bowlers; he went over the infield even when the ball wasn't pitched right up; he walked across his stumps to manufacture a boundary to long leg even when he'd hit a six earlier in the over.

Even his dismissal on 81 came from this sort of intent; he stepped out to Avesh in the 12th over and looked to whip him over the leg side. He might have picked up a boundary if he'd hit it a few meters further to deep square leg's left, but on this day he hit it within the fielder's range.

Saha was taking this sort of risk almost every time he went after the bowling. He could have been out for 15 or 20 on another day, and other innings he plays often end on scores like that. But Titans would want it no other way from him. They have plenty of batting depth, and every ball Saha doesn't try to squeeze the most out of is a ball Hardik Pandya or David Miller isn't getting to face.

On this day, Saha's intent brought him 81 off 43, and went a long way towards Titans all but batting Super Giants out of the game. Had Super Giants been chasing 200 rather than 228, the 88-run opening stand between Mayers and de Kock may have put them in a winning position. As it happened, they were still behind the required rate when the partnership ended, and the rest of their batting struggled to keep up.

By then Saha was putting his feet up, letting KS Bharat do the dirty work behind the stumps. There was a sense of poignancy to this substitution - India's team management phased Saha out of their Test-match plans last year to let Bharat grow into the role of Pant's understudy.

Thanks to events that no one could have foreseen, Pant is out of action for the foreseeable future, and Bharat is the only keeper in India's squad for the World Test Championship final. There are plenty who believe Saha still deserves that spot - he may believe it himself, but he knows it isn't in his control.

All he can do is control the controllables within the role he's given by the team that's picked him, and he's doing a pretty good job of it.