Arya and Inglis - contrasting methods, near-identical results

Why move when you can simply stand still? Priyansh Arya asks this question every time he bats.

There was a moment on Monday night when Josh Inglis called Arya for a single that was never on, and sent him back when he was a third of the way down the pitch with the ball already in the mid-off fielder's hands. Even a dive wasn't going to save Arya if there was a direct hit at the bowler's end, but there needed to be one, with no one backing up at the stumps. Other batters may have dived anyway. Arya simply stood there, waiting placidly for the throw's accuracy to determine his fate.

The throw missed. Arya lived on.

That was only the most extreme example of Arya's no-wasted-energy philosophy. Monday's other examples came when he was on strike during Punjab Kings' (PBKS) chase of 185 against Mumbai Indians (MI). There were, for instance, two fours in the first over of the innings, both stroked over the off-side inner ring when Trent Boult offered him width, both played with languidly minimal footwork that seemed to dilate the time that elapsed between ball leaving bowler's hand and ball meeting bat.

It's one thing to stand still and let the ball come to you when it's coming at the pace you expect from that bowler. It's another thing entirely to play a shot like Arya did in the fourth over, off Deepak Chahar, to move from 15 to 19.

This shot came off a 118kph knuckle ball, from a bowler whose previous over had been a maiden full of knuckle balls to Arya's opening partner Prabhsimran Singh. And that hadn't been a bowler tying down a struggling batter; Prabhsimran has been in red-hot form all through IPL 2025. But he wasn't quite coming to grips with the slower ball on a pitch where slower balls had been notably hard to hit - PBKS' bowlers had used it with great skill to restrict Suryakumar Yadav, of all people, to 57 off 39 balls.

Chahar's knuckle ball to Arya, then, wasn't a straightforward ball to hit to the boundary on this pitch. Arya, at any rate, didn't hit it. He stood still, waited, waited some more, and met the ball with a checked jab to send it racing past the right hand of the diving fielder at short cover.

"I said, maybe four or five games in[to the season], that I felt Priyansh Arya was going to be one of the finds of the tournament," PBKS head coach Ricky Ponting said after the match. "Think that's pretty hard to argue with now. Just a fearless young talent, you know, going out there, seeing the ball and hitting the ball."

Arya's see-ball, hit-ball methods have already been spoken about in excited tones. Monday night revealed a new layer: how well Arya sees the ball, and how that allows him to hold his shape and stay still for as long as he needs to before he hits it, even when it isn't coming off the pitch at a predictable pace.

So easy was Arya making batting look that it needed Prabhsimran to get wrenched out of shape repeatedly at the other end - he was out for 13 off 16, falling to the second chance he offered off a miscued skier - to put his innings in context.

It was a victory for PBKS' tactical tweaks: they had loaded up on batting depth at the expense of a specialist bowler in their last match, a defeat to DC on Saturday, and had course-corrected here

Prabhsimran's departure brought to the crease Inglis - and another study in contrasts, which extended over a match-winning partnership of 109 in 59 balls.

Inglis is anything but languid. Even when he's notionally still in his stance, he's a crouching storehouse of potential energy straining to burst into a flurry of quick feet and quicker hands. And where Arya simply strokes, punches, and slaps the ball into his favourite zones no matter where the fielders are, Inglis constantly scans the field for gaps to target.

At the six-over mark, PBKS were 47 for 1, going at well below their required rate. MI brought on Mitchell Santner, a master of pace changes who had taken 3 for 11 in four overs in his last game against Delhi Capitals (DC). It felt like a critical moment.

And Inglis, batting on 8 off 8 at that point, made his intentions clear. Santner was bowling with the longer square boundary to the off side of the right-handed Inglis, with a strong breeze blowing from off to leg, all of which made straying in line doubly dangerous. Santner's first two balls to Inglis were both aimed at making him hit to the off side, and both were dots; a firm cut to point, and a missed reverse-sweep off a 77kph dangler wide of off stump.

Even though he missed it, that reverse-sweep was something of a win for Inglis. It's hard for a spinner, even one turning his stock ball away from the batter, to protect the boundary against that shot, since you can only have five fielders outside the 30-yard circle. Inglis probably expected Santner to straighten his line next ball, and he did. And it wasn't a bad ball: quick and only marginally short of a length, but Inglis probably expected both those things. He rocked deep in his crease and cleared the man guarding the short boundary at deep midwicket with a straight bat-pull - the shot Heinrich Klaasen has made his trademark - his low crouch helping him get under the ball and generate elevation.

Inglis continued to press on with this mix of field manipulation and lightning hands and feet, ramping Hardik Pandya for a six over short third in the eighth over and reverse-sweeping Ashwani Kumar twice while hitting him for three successive fours in the 11th.

Arya, who had spent most of this period away from the strike, then asserted himself with back-to-back boundaries in the 12th over, slapping Hardik over the covers for four and slugging him over wide long-on for six with an effortless baseball swing to bring up his half-century off 27 balls. Inglis, who had brought up his fifty two balls earlier, was batting on 50 off 29.

Contrasting methods, near-identical returns, and PBKS were cruising, needing 65 off 48 balls to seal a top-two finish and a place in Qualifier 1. They got there with nine balls to spare.

It was a victory for the side that had bowled better on the day, making better use of the pitch, the ground's asymmetry, and the wind conditions. It was a victory for PBKS' tactical tweaks: they had loaded up on batting depth at the expense of a specialist bowler in their last match, a defeat to DC on Saturday, and had course-corrected here.

Above all, it was a victory for the best batting team of IPL 2025 to this point. PBKS have passed 200 seven times this season, and their last six matches have brought them totals of 201, 194, 236, 219, 206 and 187, with the two sub-200 scores coming in successful chases. Seven of their batters have scored at least 100 runs this season at 30-plus averages and 149-plus strike rates. The thing that makes their line-up so dangerous is that any two or three of them could fire on a given day. On this day, it was a left-right pair of utterly captivating contrasts.