T20 World Cup 2024: Enjoying adulation after enduring hostility

New York: When the stump camera is looking at the skies, it’s not a good sign for the person in charge of ensuring that doesn’t happen. The person responsible for this angular alteration must enjoy the optics, though. Hardik Pandya did on Wednesday. 

He went through with a non-theatrical follow-through before being embraced by the rest of the team, but you could tell he revelled in it. 

Hitting the top of the middle stump in their very first over, and resoundingly so, is not something medium pacers forget easily. Pandya must be playing back that dismissal of Lorcan Tucker even now. 

That was the first of three wickets he picked up on a ‘spicy’ pitch at the Nassau County International stadium, and it was the best of the lot, but the gravity of this performance is not in the mere numbers. It can’t be contained in the context of this one game alone either.

It’s quite likely that Pandya was among the most disliked cricketers coming into the T20 World Cup in the Americas. And, those sentiments could just as easily have been revisited had it not been for the start he made in New York. 

On Wednesday, he finished with figures of three for 27 from four overs, including a maiden, and this spell is exactly what Pandya, and India, needed at this point in his life. 

After a freak ankle injury at the 50-over World Cup towards the end of last year, Pandya, although retained in Grade A of the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s central contract, was left in the lurch. This was his first game for India since that fateful day against Bangladesh in Pune.

Sandwiched between these two timeframes - June 5, 2024, and October 19, 2023 - is where things got complicated for Pandya. Again. 

In his desperation to regain fitness for the remaining World Cup matches last year, Pandya resorted to extreme measures like taking multiple injections and removing blood clots from his ankle, but pushing the boundaries only aggravated the injury, forcing him to sit out of the entire showpiece.

"I got injections done on my ankles at three different places and I had to remove blood from my ankle because of the swelling. I didn't want to give up (on playing the remainder of the World Cup); for the team I will give my best. If there is one percent chance that I can be with the team I will try my best," Pandya had revealed earlier.

"While I was pushing myself, I had this re-occurrence (of injury) and it became a three-month injury. I was not able to walk but I was trying to run (at) that point in time. When I came off the field following the injury, I informed the team that I would be back in five days. I tried to push myself for 10 days, took painkillers to make a comeback and rejoined the team. But this was a freak injury and very few people know about it.”

What people did know, though, was that Pandya was doing a rather poor job of running the Mumbai Indians after replacing Rohit Sharma as the skipper. 

Having led the Gujarat Titans to a title in 2022, the younger, more exuberant Pandya was expected to shepherd the five-time champions. 

Instead, they finished at the bottom of the table, and a large part of that failure was because Pandya was trying too hard to be something he wasn’t. Naturally, the fanbase didn’t appreciate the pretension and went after him by booing him at any given chance.

Pandya typically enjoys playing villain, but this time, you could tell it was getting to him. It didn’t help either that his personal life was being dragged through the mud on social media. 

Under these circumstances, Pandya finished the IPL with 216 runs and 11 wickets. But, the real concern wasn’t about what had happened as of May 16 (Mumbai’s last league game), there were more significant questions to be asked, chief of all, how is Pandya going to fare at the World Cup?

So far, so good. 

“Hardik looked really good. Hardik has been - I mean, even in the practice game and even in the practice, He's been bowling well. He looks fit enough to go through four overs and he's been bowling with some pace and some accuracy,” said India’s batting coach Vikram Rathour in the wake of India’s win. 

Pandya is one of the most talented all-rounders India has ever produced. He is also one of the most controversial. 

If he gets it together, as he did on Wednesday, India have a genuine match-winner on their hands. If he doesn’t and slips into the dark chasms he occasionally goes into, he is going to be a liability.

A game of dice anyone?