IPL 2025 showed the might of the uncapped Indian batter

The last four balls of IPL 2025 may not have held too much competitive significance, with Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) having already shut Punjab Kings (PBKS) out mathematically, but they were significant at a symbolic level. It was entirely fitting that the tournament ended with an uncapped Indian batter, Shashank Singh, dispatching a world-class overseas quick, Josh Hazlewood, for 6, 4, 6, 6.

This was the season of the Uncapped Indian Batter (UIB). An unprecedented nine of them, including Shashank, scored more than 250 runs during IPL 2025, and this explosion was coming, because the previous record of six UIBs going past that aggregate was jointly held by IPLs 2023 and 2024.

UIBs weren't just unusually prolific this season, but also among its quickest-scoring batters. Of the 17 batters who went at 175-plus strike rates while facing at least 30 balls, seven were UIBs, of whom five - Urvil Patel, Vaibhav Suryavanshi, Ayush Mhatre, Vipraj Nigam and Priyansh Arya - were in their debut seasons.

And this wasn't just a tale of outliers.

For most of the IPL's lifespan, Indian batters as a collective have scored significantly slower than their overseas counterparts, with uncapped Indian batters scoring slower than Indian batters on the whole. But look at those three lines' trajectories over recent seasons. All of them have converged while climbing steeply, with UIBs marking 2025 by scoring quicker (156.99) than overseas batters (153.04) as well as the larger mass of Indian batters (152.08) for the first time in IPL history.

While UIBs have scored quicker and quicker over recent seasons and overtaken the other two groups, their collective average has remained the lowest of the three groups. Together, the two graphs show how teams in the IPL, in broad terms, organise their line-ups: capped Indians who tend to bat for longer and take fewer risks; proven overseas names who bring elite skills honed across multiple leagues and tend to play phase-specific or bowler-specific roles; and a growing cast of UIBs who play high-risk roles that prioritise boundary-hitting over survival.

It's no coincidence that UIBs dominate the top end of IPL 2025's strike rates list and that capped Indian batters account for seven of the top ten run-getters. This is partly down to stature; it would be natural for PBKS to view the wicket of Arya as more dispensable than that of Shreyas Iyer - it's a sign of how good a season the latter enjoyed that he still ended up with a 175-plus strike rate. But it's also down to inclination, because UIBs increasingly arrive in the IPL with methods built for T20 - and often T20 above all else.

Viewers astonished at the precocious feats of Suryavanshi and Mhatre may have wondered to themselves if Sachin Tendulkar was at the same level at the same age. The answer is that he certainly was in terms of hand, eye and judgment of length - the unteachable qualities at the very core of unusually gifted batters - but those gifts, when he learned his cricket in the 1980s, were trained to meet entirely different demands: not of hitting 140kph bowling into the stands in a repeatable way but of scoring centuries day in and day out in long-duration games.

Suryavanshi, in short, grew up learning to play an entirely different sport to the one Tendulkar learned to play. As T20 has evolved, it has grown more and more distant from the longer formats, increasingly becoming a sport for specialists. It's only natural that the UIBs who took IPL 2025 by storm either came to their teams' notice via barnstorming performances in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy - the BCCI's inter-state T20 tournament - or in leagues run by state associations, and that they either have little or no experience of red-ball domestic cricket or ordinary records in that format.

The most instructive example is that of Punjab, a state that has over recent years produced Abhishek Sharma, Ramandeep Singh, Prabhsimran Singh, Nehal Wadhera and Naman Dhir. Four of them featured in Punjab's 2024-25 Ranji Trophy campaign (they finished seventh in their eight-team group) and scored one half-century between them in 21 innings - that innings ended at 51. Abhishek didn't play that tournament at all.

The IPL has reached a level of competitiveness now that demands players to be at the very top of their game - their T20 game. And becoming an elite T20 player - at this stage this seems truer for batters than bowlers - almost necessarily means compromising on longer-format attributes.

It probably wasn't a coincidence that KL Rahul's Test-match form nosedived just when he was making his most explosive starts in the IPL, and that his famous "strike rate is overrated" comment came in the months leading up to a successful Test comeback. It probably wasn't a coincidence either that Rohit Sharma's consistency as a Test opener began to decline soon after he adopted a radically adventurous top-order approach in white-ball cricket. And where Rahul and Rohit were making difficult choices about their game when they were established all-format players, the UIBs of the 2020s seem to be arriving in the IPL with their choice already made.

And why would they not?

Almost all the way since its inception, the twin pressures that the IPL has exerted on cricket's calendar and economy have forced overseas players to make hard choices about their careers. The pressure of fixture clashes has never existed for Indian players, but pressure of the IPL's economic might was bound to tell, sooner or later, and eventually shape the nature of India's talent pool.

The result isn't necessarily all bad. This was a celebratory piece when you began reading it, and it still is in a lot of ways. Having spent so many years behind the curve in terms of T20 skillsets and strategy, India are now so dominant in that format that they have probably become a better team after retirements and workload management combined to break up their World-Cup-winning combination of 2024. IPL 2025's class of UIBs is only likely to intensify competition for places and move the team another step down the evolutionary road. These are all good things.

They would be unequivocally good things if T20 existed in isolation, and in the moments of delirium and dejection that followed Shashank's 6, 4, 6, 6 finish to IPL 2025, Virat Kohli reminded us all that it doesn't. Kohli had just won his first IPL title and ended a quest of 18 seasons. He had been an RCB player for longer than he had been an India player.

"This moment is right up there with the best moments I've had in my career," he said, "but it's still marks five levels under Test cricket. That's how much I value Test cricket. That's how much I love Test cricket. I would just urge youngsters coming through to treat that format with respect.

"If you perform in Test cricket, you walk around anywhere in the world, people look you in the eye, shake your hand, and say well done, you played the game really well. If you want to earn respect in world cricket all over, take up Test cricket, give your heart and soul to it, and earn the respect from legends."

These seemed like the words of a man who had looked into the future, been thrilled by a lot of what he saw, but felt worry gnaw at his bones all the same. Players have too little agency in shaping the future of the game, and it's perhaps unfair to ask them to bear that burden, but they're the constituency Kohli belongs to, and their language is his language. He too was once a UIB.