Sixes are the primary currency of T20 cricket, but sometimes you can get a game like the one on Thursday night at the Wankhede Stadium. Mumbai Indians (MI) hit 11 sixes to Punjab Kings’ (PBKS) nine, but ended up not just losing but getting hammered: PBKS romped home with 21 balls remaining.Four batters – two from each side – made 50-plus scores, and Prabhsimran Singh hit the fewest sixes (two) of them all. But he ended up with easily the best strike rate of the four, 205.12.
Prabhsimran’s unbeaten 39-ball 80 was a truly unusual innings. At one level, it was all about control. It was about controlling a chase of a slightly below-par MI total in conditions favouring the chasing team, and he did this almost perfectly – enjoying one major slice of luck when Jasprit Bumrah put down a sitter when he was on 11 – finishing with a control percentage of nearly 90, the best once more of the four batters who passed 50.
High control, an avoidance of aerial shots by and large, and yet Prabhsimran’s strike rate almost never dipped below 200.
This was, in many ways, an innings similar to Sanju Samson’s unbeaten 97 in India’s virtual T20 World Cup quarter-final against West Indies at Eden Gardens last month. Small ground, quick outfield, plenty of dew to quicken it further, and a target of 196. Like Samson that day, Prabhsimran kept hitting the ball into the gaps, and kept getting full value for his shots.
These were truly conditions for a batter like Prabhsimran to shine. He’s a slightly more old-fashioned cricketer than his PBKS opening partner Priyansh Arya or his Punjab opening partner Abhishek Sharma, who have overall T20 strike rates in the 170s and hit roughly one six for every 1.5 fours. Prabhsimran’s strike rate is a tick below 150, and he hits one six for every 1.85 fours.
And at PBKS, because Prabhsimran isn’t quite as explosive as Arya, because he’s the older (though not by much) and more established face of the two, and because he’s part of one of the most exciting line-ups in the IPL, he tends to get spoken of primarily as one half of an opening partnership and a cog in a powerful batting machine.
“Even though [he was] getting runs, he was giving us excellent starts [last year], this time I feel he’s got that maturity to finish the game, and it’s great to see youngsters coming up and finishing off the games, taking the responsibility, and saying okay, I’m going to win the match for the team”
Shreyas Iyer
On Thursday night, the shape of the contest and the conditions at the Wankhede came together to put Prabhsimran front and centre. The stage was set for someone to play the 2026 version of old-fashioned cricket: to rattle along at two runs per ball while only rarely hitting in the air.
It took until the eighth over of PBKS’ innings for Prabhsimran to hit his first six. The main reason for this was that he had been starved of strike until then – he had only faced nine balls in a powerplay where PBKS made 61 for 2. The other reason was that he was timing the ball with crisp certainty, right from the time he clipped the first ball he faced, from Deepak Chahar, past midwicket for four.
Then, when he did hit his first six, he did so with an emphatic announcement of intent. Shardul Thakur had bowled the seventh over and conceded only eight runs, and both Prabhsimran and Shreyas Iyer had struggled for fluency against his wide-of-off-stump knuckle balls. After clattering 21 off their first over, PBKS had made 48 for 2 in six.
One over into the middle overs, MI may have hoped they could slow things down even further with the fields now spread, particularly with the slower ball showing it could be a useful tool.
Then Chahar came back into the attack and began the eighth over with a slower ball, which Prabhsimran pulled for two.
Next ball, Prabhsimran jumped out of his crease, sensing Chahar would bowl another slower ball, with every intention to create momentum into the ball and use it to hit down the ground. He picked the perfect ball for it, and ended up right where he needed to be to launch it over wide long-off.
Chahar’s reply wasn’t a bad one, but it was ever so slightly off-target. And Prabhsimran almost seemed to expect exactly how it would play out. Given that Chahar was looking to bowl slower balls, fine leg was inside the circle. Given the events of the previous ball, Chahar was likely to pull his length back and go into the pitch. Given that Chahar’s slower ball is an offcutter, Prabhsimran could expect something he could tuck past fine leg if the ball strayed a little too close to his pads.
So Prabhsimran shuffled across his crease and almost made sure the ball would be where he wanted it to be. A deft little glance, and the ball was off in a flash to the left of short fine leg.
With those two shots, Prabhsimran had deflated any sense MI may have felt of still being able to wrest control of the contest. And with those two shots, Prabhsimran had offered a little window into the methods that have made him so dangerous in the middle overs.
Since the start of the 2025 season, Prabhsimran has the fourth-highest middle-overs strike rate (172.94) of all batters to have scored at least 200 runs in this phase (overs 7 to 16). Look at the names around him on the table.
The table shows Prabhsimran isn’t a six-hitter at the level of Nicholas Pooran (who is?) or even Rajat Patidar or Iyer. But he, like Suryakumar Yadav, finds ways to hit a lot of fours even when the field is spread.
It’s an invaluable skill, and it makes him extremely dangerous in matches like this one, where the conditions, the scale of the target, and his skillset combined to allow him to score at a frenetic rate while taking minimal risk by contemporary T20 standards.
“I think he has certainly raised his bar, considering the last season where he was going in the powerplay, just swinging wild,” Iyer said after the match. “Even though [he was] getting runs, he was giving us excellent starts [last year], this time I feel he’s got that maturity to finish the game, and it’s great to see youngsters coming up and finishing off the games, taking the responsibility, and saying okay, I’m going to win the match for the team.
“So phenomenal player, talent, and I feel that the more matches he’s getting, he’s actually getting more and more mature.”
High praise from the PBKS captain, even if he may have got his timelines wrong, because Prabhsimran was on his way to becoming this player even during IPL 2025.
Once Prabhsimran was in on Thursday, there was little MI could do to stop him. They didn’t post a big enough total to start with, and most of their bowlers were off-key, but who knows if the contest would have appeared quite as one-sided without an innings like Prabhsimran’s.
Karthik Krishnaswamy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo
