Ishan Kishan's 31-ball 74 in Jaipur is the latest entry in a quietly excellent SRH season
The numbers on the scorecard from Sawai Mansingh Stadium do not quite tell you what Ishan Kishan did on Saturday night. They tell you he made 74 from 31, that he hit eleven fours and three sixes, that he edged a short ball from Jofra Archer in the 14th over and walked off. They do not tell you that Sunrisers Hyderabad were trying to chase 229 against an attack that has had Vaibhav Sooryavanshi for fun all season, or that Kishan and Abhishek Sharma had the game wrapped up by the time he got out.
That is the thing about Ishan Kishan in this Sunrisers shirt. The job keeps getting done.
His 132-run stand with Abhishek came off 55 balls. By the time the partnership broke, the required rate had dropped to under nine. Travis Head and Aniket Verma did the rest in the kind of hurry that says the heavy lifting was already over. Five wickets, nine balls to spare, and a fourth straight win that takes Sunrisers to third in the table.
Four in a row, with the same fingerprints on every chase
Sunrisers were 1-3 after four games. The narrative around them was that the Pat Cummins-led 2024 final run had been a one-off, that the batting was top-heavy, that Kishan was a luxury they could not afford in the middle order. Then Cummins missed nearly the entire start of the season recovering from the lumbar stress injury that had worsened after the Adelaide Test in December, Travis Head and Heinrich Klaasen had quiet weeks, and Kishan stepped up. He even captained the side for stretches in Cummins' absence.
He has 312 runs from eight matches at an average of 39 and three fifties, with his highest score coming in a successful chase. Against Rajasthan in the league phase last week he made 91. Now this 74. The strike rate sits at the kind of number you usually only see from openers playing against the new ball, which is exactly what he has been doing at the top of the order since match four.
Buying form back from a hard winter
It is easy to forget how recently Kishan was being written off. Sunrisers paid 11.25 crore for him in the 2025 auction and watched him struggle through most of last season. The India door looked shut. He was no longer in the Test or one-day setups and even his T20 spot was up for review.
Then came a domestic season that quietly reset everything. He led Jharkhand to the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy title in December 2025, scored heavily through that tournament, and walked into India's T20 World Cup squad on form alone. That tournament gave him 317 runs at a strike rate of 193, including the kind of innings that gets selectors talking again.
By the time IPL 2026 started, the question was no longer whether Kishan deserved a place in the Sunrisers eleven. It was who he opened the batting with.
"Best is yet to come"
Kishan said as much himself after Saturday's match. "Best is yet to come," he told the broadcaster, and on the evidence of these last four games it is hard to argue. Cummins is back in the side and took a wicket on his return in Jaipur. With Klaasen and Head still to fire and Abhishek already in form alongside him, the team that started 1-3 is now third on the table and looking like a side that knows what it is doing.
Saturday was Sooryavanshi's night for the highlight reel. The 36-ball century, the sixes that kept clearing the long boundary, the 112-run stand with Dhruv Jurel. None of it mattered by the end. Kishan and Abhishek made sure of that.
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