Gimme more: how Sai Sudharsan's insatiable appetite for cricket paid off

"Romba perumai. To play for the country in Test cricket…"

B Sai Sudharsan's mother, Usha Bharadwaj, says she is very proud, and then trails away, lost for words, when asked about the prospect of her son making his Test debut in England.

"We Face-timed him as a family after he got picked in India's Test squad," she says. "Me and my husband are here in Chennai, [our] elder son is working in Australia, and Sai Sudharsan was in Ahmedabad." Sai Sudharsan piled up a chart-topping 759 runs in 15 innings at a strike rate of 156.17 for Gujarat Titans this IPL season.

"We are in different parts of the world now, but that call took us back to 2020, when we trained together as a family," she says.

In December 2019, Sai Sudharsan was in tears after he was dropped from Tamil Nadu's Under-19 team. He was not in great physical shape, and acknowledging it, channelled his hurt into working towards becoming a fitter, stronger player. Early the following year, he began training with his mother, a strength and conditioning coach, who used to be a volleyball player for Tamil Nadu. His father, R Bharadwaj, a former track athlete who represented India at the South Asian Games in Dhaka in 1993, also played a key role.

"During the [pandemic] period, we started training together," Usha says. "I took care of his strength and conditioning, while my husband took care of Sai Sudharsan's running and ground training. We wanted to make sure he had strength and endurance - the foundation for fitness. If you have both, you can push to play any sport. Flexibility is also important.

"Because of Covid, all of us had to be indoors, and fitness became a family activity for us. Sai Sudharsan got addicted to it, and I also showed him videos of Virat Kohli, which motivated him and encouraged to become fitter and stronger. His brother also chucked a lot of balls to him at the nets. He used to do push-ups and then challenge Sai Sudharsan to do it."

From there on, Sai Sudharsan became obsessed with improving himself and evolving. Having grown up playing on extreme turners in Chennai, he was always good against spin, but his batting against pace needed some fine-tuning. He exposed himself to side-arm throwdowns at speeds upwards of 140kph, and picked up the ramp shot from Gujarat Titans team-mate Matthew Wade.

Most batters would have been satisfied with the kind of returns he got in this year's IPL, but Sai Sudharsan is not most batters. He signed off from the tournament saying he has "a lot of things to improve" as a T20 batter.

His coaches and seniors have marvelled at his hunger to train harder and bat longer than anyone else. He has had to be dragged out of the nets by his coaches on occasion. Even when he travelled to Ahmedabad to collect a number of awards after the IPL, he managed to squeeze in some net sessions.

"Sai Su is someone who is religious about his nets and practice," R Sai Kishore, Sai Sudharsan's captain at Tamil Nadu and long-time IPL team-mate at GT, says. "How do I put it? He's mad about practice and there is no room for complacency at all - something that we spoke about even after the IPL ended.

"From 2021 to 2022, there was a massive difference in Sai Su's game, 2022-23, there was again a massive difference, and so on every year.

"That drive to keep getting better is the most amusing thing about him. To do this at 23, the sky is the limit for him." Sai Kishore considers Sai Sudharsan an inspiration. "I might be a senior to him in terms of age and all, but I've learnt a lot from him."

Sai Sudharsan's first-class average of 39.93 after 49 innings isn't flash, but India's selectors see potential and a high ceiling. He also has experience of playing in England, having turned out for a handful of games for Surrey across the 2023 and 2024 seasons.

When the club first picked Sai Sudharsan, he had played fewer than ten first-class games and had not made his ODI debut. He made up for the lack of experience with his meticulous preparation. Alec Stewart, the former England wicketkeeper-batter, who was Surrey's director of cricket at the time, was impressed.

Before playing his first game for Surrey, against Northamptonshire in September 2023, Sai Sudharsan turned up for the county 2nd XI in Guildford, trying to acclimatise to the English conditions and the Dukes ball.

"Sai came as an unknown and his experience of the English game was very limited," Stewart says. "Vikram Solanki [the former England batter and current GT director of cricket] was massive in recommending him to me, and I have so much respect for Vikram. From his first training session, you could see that he was a special talent, and he hasn't looked back. He loves to bat - whether in the nets or in the middle - and just fitted into our set-up perfectly."

Stewart reckons Sai Sudharsan's soft hands and his range of shots will serve him well in English conditions.

"He plays the ball late, and that's the most important thing here. If you go too hard and get too far out in front of yourself, when the ball seams, you're not in control, then your bat can get outside of your eyeline, whereas he plays it under his eyeline, plays it under his eyes, and plays it late. And even if he does nick it a little bit, like Kane Williamson, for example - you can nick it, but it still falls short of slip and that again is a real attribute of Sai's.

"The pitches are quicker here, certainly at The Oval, and to succeed, you have to be able to play off the back foot. You've got to be selective to pull, hook, cut or let go. He gets out of the [line of the] short ball well but can also play the uppercut over the slips. He's got a full array of shots, and he gets them in right order."

The Dukes ball has a tendency to swing more than the Kookaburra and the SG ones, but Sai Sudharsan has had enough practice with it.

"When he's gone back home, he's taken some of our Dukes cricket balls back with him," Stewart says. "I didn't charge him for them and just let him have them," he laughs. "But, no… he had that forward-thinking [mindset] and trained with those balls, so that when he comes back to us, or hopefully [is] picked for India on tour, he'll have had nice practice against the Dukes cricket ball as well.

"Some of those will probably be worn out by now because I gave them to him last year, but he's a quick learner and he practises with a purpose. Yes, he likes volume, but he also likes to improve."

From watching videos of Kohli shown him by his mother, Sai Sudharsan is now a frontrunner to slot into India's top four in the post-Kohli Test era. Stewart, a veteran of over 130 Tests, has some advice for the young batter.

"Obviously big shoes to fill, with Mr Kohli standing down," Stewart says. "But no one can do what Virat has done. If he can go in and almost not think of 'I'm Virat' because he's not replacing him… Virat has retired. And therefore, can he not be the next Virat but can he be the best version of Sai Sudharsan? Then India have got yet another high-quality cricketer."

Sai Kishore believes Sai Sudharsan won't be weighed down by the pressure of expectations and backs him to make the step up to Test cricket successfully. "Sai Su has no stage fright," he says. "He made his IPL debut before he made his first-class debut. Be it TNPL [Tamil Nadu Premier League], TN, county, IPL or India, he was never taken aback by the situation or by the atmosphere. You come across a lot of skilful players, but they may not have the right mindset. Sai Su is supremely skilled and mentally strong, which is quite a rare combination."

India will enter a new era in England without the old firm of Kohli and Rohit Sharma. Sai Sudharsan could be one of the new faces who defines that new era.