"Dear cricket, give me one more chance."
Karun Nair tweeted this on December 10, 2022, when he was at his lowest ebb as a cricketer. Here was a Test-match triple-centurion and a giant of the domestic game - a central figure in back-to-back treble-winning seasons for Karnataka - left out of his state team, across formats. He had only just turned 31.
It was only natural, then, that this tweet gained a lot of traction on Sunday, April 13, 2025. Nair had played his first IPL game in nearly three years, and scored his first IPL half-century in nearly seven years - 2520 days, to be precise, the longest gap between IPL fifties for anyone, ever.
Our hearts are full pic.twitter.com/cau5zlrmcE
— Delhi Capitals (@DelhiCapitals) April 13, 2025
Cricket, for all that, had given Nair plenty of chances between that tweet and this game. He had had to wait a full season and move to a new team before making his domestic comeback, but had, thereafter, scored more runs (3035) and hundreds (12) than anyone else in India's first-class, List A and T20 domestic competitions. This included an otherworldly season of 50-overs cricket in which he scored five hundreds in eight innings and averaged a ridiculous 389.50. He had won a Ranji Trophy and reached a Vijay Hazare Trophy final with Vidarbha. On top of all that, he had played 10 County Championship matches across two seasons for Northamptonshire and scored 736 runs at 56.61.
For a lot of viewers, though, Sunday night was that one more chance Nair had been waiting for. Only hardcore fans follow cricket outside international matches and the IPL, and this dictates media coverage of the game, which in turn dictates where the eyeballs go, which in turn dictates…
All this creates a sense among the wider cricket-consuming public that while domestic cricket exists and matters, it only matters in a stepping-stone kind of way. When India calls someone up after three or four strong seasons for their state team, news reports usually frame the story in a "finally, X is rewarded for years of domestic toil" kind of way.
And so, here was Nair, getting one more chance, finally. Here he was, introduced for the first time in IPL 2025, in DC's fifth game of the season, introduced as an Impact Player at 0 for 1 in a chase of 206.
For all the runs and hundreds he'd scored leading up to this moment, though, there was still reason for Nair's fans to feel a bit of trepidation. He had had his share of sparkling moments in 76 previous IPL games, but on the whole his time in the tournament had been stop-start, with more stop than start. He'd come back now, having unlocked a new level of prolific in domestic cricket, but he was about to face Trent Boult and Jasprit Bumrah in a 200-plus chase.
Before he could face those two, though, he had to survive a tricky first ball, a pinpoint inswinging yorker from Deepak Chahar. And he did this in a way that portended good things, radiating a sense of stillness and certainty, seeming to have all the time in the world to move his front leg out of the ball's way and bring a straight bat down to keep it out.
"Quite honestly, I had the confidence that I've played before and I know how it's going to be, and it's nothing different, and I'm not going to be facing anything new," Nair said in his post-match press conference. "But in my mind it was just about going out there and giving myself a few balls and just getting used to the speed of the game and the atmosphere.
"I just told myself, give yourself time, play normal shots, and then improvise when needed, and fortunately everything came off."
His innings was true to those words, except the normal shots he played at the start came with abnormal levels of timing and poise. He hit three fours off the first four legal balls he faced from Boult - he had only faced three balls before this - and each of them was a normal shot, but you need to be in eerily good rhythm to play them the way Nair did.
The first was a square drive off a good-length ball angled away from him, and all he did was lean on the ball and meet it with a slightly open bat-face. Everything hinged on the moment of contact with the ball: it happened right under Nair's eyes, and it coincided perfectly with his transfer of weight from back foot to front. The same, impeccable timing went into another drive three balls later, this time between cover point and short cover, and in between there was a gorgeous square cut that showcased one of Nair's greatest gifts, his ability to use his hands to manipulate his bat face to place the ball just so.
A tick next to the box marked Boult; now how would he go against Bumrah? The answer: nine balls, 26 runs, three fours, two sixes. Here again was the same sense of stillness, but taken up a notch, because Bumrah was trying to wrench him out of shape with his changes of pace. They had no effect on Nair: he was seeing the ball beautifully, holding his shape until the ball reached him, and dispatching it where he pleased, with high-elbow lofts, flat-bat swats and wristy steers through and over the off side and, best of all, an effortless short-arm whip over square leg for six.
Wasim Jaffer was all praise for the batter's knock of 89 against MI
And there was one major difference between his set-ups against Boult and Bumrah. Against Boult, he adopted a conventional trigger movement that took his back foot to off stump. Against Bumrah, his back foot went the other way, starting on middle stump and moving to leg. This was a man with a plan, fully prepared to seize this moment.
"I felt confident, I felt like I'm well-prepared to play in the IPL if given the opportunity, so it was all about me preparing the way that I have been all through the season, and waiting for my chance," Nair said. "I was doing my bit to prepare and be ready for the game, and then it's always a tough call for the team management to pick 11 or 12 players. I've always respected that, and for me it's about preparing and keeping the same process that I've followed, which has worked for me, and just being ready to go out there and perform for the team."
Every player will tell you that it's all about the process, and while you might be tired of hearing it, it remains key to long-term success. It's a truth that's particularly hard for batters to internalise, because theirs is a pursuit marked by constant failure. Figuring out the processes that best worked for him - in training, in the middle, perhaps even in life - may well have been what took Nair from a lavishly gifted, high-ceiling batter who often went through frustrating spells of inconsistency and turned him to the run machine of recent years. All those runs and centuries in domestic cricket, in India and England, were both a byproduct of these processes and a means of reinforcing and refining them.
By the time Sunday night happened, Nair seemed fully secure in the knowledge of who he was and what he was capable of.
This latter encompassed quite a range: from the stillness and "normal" shots against MI's quicks in the powerplay to breathtaking improvisation behind the wicket when the fields spread out.
Nair has made quick runs in the IPL in the past: his previous fifty, for Kings XI Punjab (as they were still known then) against Chennai Super Kings in 2018, had also come at a 200-plus strike rate. Perhaps never before, though, had this tournament witnessed this full flourishing of his talent.
At 33, Nair had grabbed this chance that the IPL had given him. He was primed to do so, though, having grabbed all the other chances cricket had given him since that doleful December day.