(ESPNCRICINFO) – THE Jasprit Bumrah yorker isn’t invincible. Not even when it starts to tail. Shreyas Iyer met it with extraordinary coolness and an open face of the bat to find a boundary. It gave him the 61st run of an enormously impressive innings and reinforced a feeling of helplessness on Mumbai Indians (MI). They were staring into the eyes of the man who was single-handedly beating them. The five-time champions came up short, and for the first time, couldn’t defend a total in excess of 200. This means IPL 2025 will mark the arrival of a new power. Punjab Kings (PBKS) or Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB).
Shreyas=Kohli

There is something extra special about batters who do their best work in a chase. Even now, when the accepted wisdom is to know what your target is, the prospect of a batter playing like he owns every little blade of grass that surrounds him is the stuff of dreams. Shreyas had his eyes wide open. This was real. This was class.

He arrived at the crease in the last over of the powerplay and knew he couldn’t take his time. The second ball went for four. He never looked flustered, even when PBKS needed two runs a ball for the last eight overs. He launched Reece Topley for a hat-trick of sixes in the 13th over. Those three hits doubled PBKS’ chances of victory. It was 25 per cent coming into the over and 53 per cent coming out of it.

Standing deep in his crease, watching every ball right onto his bat, functioning sometimes on pure instinct. There was a four he got off Hardik Pandya where he seemed almost ready to leave the short ball only to ramp it as it

passed him and get it over the keeper. There was a six that he got off Ashwani Kumar, he almost seemed to predict the bowler would go wide yorker to mitigate the damage of a free-hit ball and he shifted across his crease and scythed the ball over cover.

His best shots though were those steers all along the ground to the backward point boundary off the two best bowlers in the opposition – Trent Boult and Bumrah. That was when everybody at the ground knew the game was firmly in Shreyas’ hand. That it had always been there. He was expressionless in victory. He knew it was his. He knew it was coming.