IPL 2025: ‘Lord’ Shardul Thakur is the Man of the Moment for Lucknow Super Giants
With LSG’s prime bowler, Mohsin Khan ruled out; Mayank Yadav and Akash Deep currently unavailable for playing, Rishabh Pant and Zaheer Khan had to rattle in search of a perfect replacement who could do the work for them.
Two names that emerged from the ashes and solved their misery, against a formidable Sunrisers Hyderabad were the experienced Shardul Thakur and newbie Prince Yadav.
From going unsold at the IPL 2025 auction last year to becoming the leading wicket-taker in the league, Shardul Thakur’s start to this season has been nothing short of sensational. Brought in as a replacement, he has now emerged as LSG’s leader in pace attack.
His four-wicket haul to dismantle Sunrisers Hyderabad will be remembered for a long time. Thakur struck twice in two balls in just his second over, by removing the dangerous Abhishek Sharma and previous match centurion Ishan Kishan.
Taking Sharma’s wicket with a short ball and sending Ishan Kishan to the pavilion with a golden duck, ‘Lord’ Shardul’s plans got perfectly executed.
While Travis Head look like he would tear the LSG bowlers with his blistering attack all over, Shardul’s early breakthroughs ensured that SRH never took full control of the innings.
During his return in the death overs too, his pace bowling dismissed the wickets of Abhinav Manohar and Mohammed Shami, thereby helping him reach the milestone 100 IPL wicket mark.
“In IPL, all these things keep happening. Unfortunately, (there were) a few injuries here and there, and there were a few inquiries if I could join the camp. But LSG approached me first, so I had to accept it. Zaheer Khan gave me a call. You have good and bad days; you have to go through it in cricket”.
“I want to create an impact and a match-winning performance. The batters are coming hard at the bowlers, why not the bowlers go hard at them, that was our plan against SRH”. Shardul said. His mental resilience, despite going unpicked by any of the franchise owners did not waver.
Thakur’s mental toughness was the key in his phenomenal performance against a hard to pull down batting line up.
His incisive and cleverly executed four-over spell won the hearts of fans and at the same time crushed the Sunrisers’ batters’ confidence. With cricket enthusiasts in complete disbelief at how franchises overlooked him during the auction, Thakur took it in his stride and let his bowling do the talking.
The Player-of-the-Match winner put a superb figure of 4 for 34 against the Sunrisers Hyderabad on Thursday night. This was also his second-best match performance with the ball this season.
With his brilliant spell, Shardul has now stormed on top of the leaderboard for the Purple Cap contenders in IPL 2025, with six wickets in the two games played by him. It looks like he has a point to prove, and this fire only adds to the excitement T20 cricket brings up.
