What's a good length for a T20 spinner? Himanish Ganjoo and Sidharth Monga dived deep into data to try and answer this question last year, and came away with two significant findings: A, the stock length for spinners has become shorter with time; and B, this has been accompanied by a significant uptick in speeds.
In the IPL, spinners are increasingly looking to bowl quick, flat balls that pitch in the 5-7m (distance from the stumps) band and finish somewhere around the top of the stumps. The traditional good length for spinners, which tends to bring batters forward without letting them drive, is usually in the 4-5m band, and the defensive good length in the 5-6m band. Given how flat pitches now tend to be, and the power and range of the best T20 hitters down the ground, spinners increasingly prefer to err on the short rather than the full side, in the belief that this, combined with the high pace they tend to bowl at, should narrow down most batters' boundary options at most times.
Axar Patel is the archetypal modern T20 spinner. His speeds seldom drop below 90kph, and often tend to be quicker than 95kph. He bowls into the pitch and attacks the top of the stumps. With his speed, he looks to deny batters the chance to get down the pitch and hit him straight, and with his line he looks to make the sweep a dangerous option. And unless he errs really short, he isn't easy to pull either, particularly if you're a right-hand batter cramped for room by the angle he creates with his wide release.
All this is to say that Aniket Verma's pulled six off Axar in the eighth over of Sunrisers Hyderabad's (SRH) innings against Delhi Capitals (DC) on Sunday afternoon was no ordinary pulled six. The ball was marginally short of good length, pitching 6.57m from the stumps, and delivered at 88.87kph. It was angling exaggeratedly into the batter in that typically Axar manner and continued to do so after pitching; it would have likely ended up marginally above and outside the line of leg stump.
Now this was marginally short of good length, and the pace was slow by Axar's standards, though it was by no means slow in absolute terms. It gave you just enough time and just enough distance from the pitch of the ball to be able to pull it, but you needed remarkable speed of eye and foot to do so.
Aniket showed just those qualities, rocking back in a flash and swivelling powerfully through the hips to send the ball sailing over the square leg boundary. His front foot swung so far round that it ended up well behind his back foot, and his back knee almost touched the ground, so low did his centre of gravity sink to be able to create elevation.
The man at the other end, Heinrich Klaasen, is one of the masters of this shot. He might have been proud to have played it.
And the circumstances around the shot made it even more remarkable. Aniket had come in at 25 for 3, which had soon become 37 for 4. He had responded as if none of those things mattered, and nothing existed outside him, the ball, and a pressing need to dismiss it from his presence. This was his second six, and fourth boundary, in 14 balls, and he was now batting on 26.
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What he did off the next ball was even better, because Axar corrected his length and pace as well as anyone could. He went fuller, but only just, landing 6m from the stumps. It was the shortest edge of the good-length area. He went quicker, to 95.61kph.
This sort of ball is hard to hit anywhere, but perhaps hardest to hit down the ground. Not if you're Aniket, though. He showed once again that lightning judgment of length and fleetness of foot, this time to advance down the pitch. He didn't reach the pitch of the ball, but it didn't matter: he simply punched through the line, without a whole lot of follow-through, and sent the ball one-bounce into the sightscreen.
Aniket had come into this IPL with just one senior appearance behind him - a T20 game in which he made a first-ball duck - with his most eye-catching performances having come at Under-23 level or in the Madhya Pradesh League. What all those performances had in common was relentless six-hitting, but it remained to be seen, when SRH signed him for his base price, whether he could do it against IPL-quality bowling.
Three innings into his debut season, it's probably safe to say he can. By the time he was done with Sunday's 41-ball 74, Aniket had faced 56 balls in the IPL and hit 12 of them over the boundary. Only Nicholas Pooran (13) has hit more sixes so far in IPL 2025.
And no uncapped batter has taken fewer balls to hit 12 IPL sixes than Aniket. He has looked particularly frightening against spin, hitting 11 sixes in 37 balls and striking at 237.83, but his pace numbers have been pretty good too, from a limited sample size: 29 runs at a strike rate of 145.00.
Being at this SRH team has certainly been an enabling factor. They stayed true to their philosophy despite being 37 for 4 against DC, and they did the same in their previous game against Lucknow Super Giants as well, when they slipped to 15 for 2. In that match, Aniket came in at 110 for 4 and hit five sixes in a 13-ball 36.
"Coming into the tournament, [he was] not super well-known, but everyone was super impressed with how he kind of entered the tournament, in the lead-up games and just that young freedom you see," SRH captain Pat Cummins said after Sunday's game. "Even when there's a few quick wickets lost, he still has the bravery to go and hit the next ball for six, so he was fantastic. He was the guy that kind of gave us half a chance."
There will be a lot of debate around the wisdom of SRH's approach in matches like their two recent defeats. It's unlikely that debate will enter the SRH dressing room, however. If Aniket gave them half a chance, in their captain's words, it was because he didn't let the situation play on his mind.
And if he appeared to be more selective with his hitting than his colleagues, or in greater control of it, it may have been thanks to the deceptive aura that can surround a successful innings, which can make viewers forget moments like the half-chance he offered on 6, when he skewed a leading edge high in the air over the covers only for Abishek Porel to put it down.
On this day, Aniket happened to be the SRH batter who had luck go his way. On other days, it'll be someone else. It's this pooling of risk that makes a method like SRH's viable, especially when the Impact Player allows them to bat someone of Wiaan Mulder's ability at No. 9 on off days like this one.
This approach demands bravery from batters, to use the word Cummins employed. What often goes without saying is that it demands incredible ability too. On the evidence of his early displays, Aniket appears to have both.
With stats inputs from Shiva Jayaraman