The Surprise Spellbinders

Master Of Mystery: Digvesh Rathi, 25, Lucknow Super Giants

Few bowlers have ever made heads turn in their debut season like Digvesh Rathi. With his rockstar mane, aggressive send-offs and deadly bowling variations, the LSG mystery spinner has been a real revelation. But there’s no mystery to his rapid rise, for that can be boiled down to hard work alone. Lucknow’s coach Justin Langer claims that if the 25-year-old could practice for 16 hours, he would. All that persistence has made him LSG’s go-to wicket-taker, with nine scalps (as of April 16) already at an unreal economy rate of 7.42 runs an over. For his economical showing of 1/21 in a high-scoring contest against Mumbai Indians, Rathi was declared Player of the Match, where he revealed that Sunil Narine was his hero. Then, in his very next match, Rathi dis≠missed his idol and celebrated by writing a note to Narine on the grass. With a leg-spinner’s run-up, in which he hides the ball, and an off-spinner’s flourish, Rathi will continue to be hard to score runs against.

Impact Player: Karun Nair, 33, Delhi Capitals

NOT TOO LONG ago, Nair took to social media to beg the game of cricket for another chance. Dropped from his state side, Karnataka, Nair’s freefall from his glory days was seeming≠ly without resistance and his days of being hailed as the next big thing for scoring a triple century in Test cricket seemed ever-so-distant. That second chance indeed arrived in the form of a call from Vidarbha, for whom the 33-year-old scored five centuries at an obscene average of 389.5 runs in the 2024-25 Vijay Hazare Trophy, and followed it up by leading his new team to the Ranji Trophy title with a hundred in the final. These numbers ensured that the IPL came a-calling after having ignored him in 2023 and 2024, and in his very first appearance for Delhi Capitals as an impact sub, he smashed Mumbai Indians around in his 40-ball 89, his highest-ever score in the league.

Sensational Southpaw: Priyansh Arya, 24, Punjab Kings

Perhaps due to his heavy-hitting in the Delhi Premier League, Punjab Kings believed in young Arya despite his back-to-back failures as an opener against Lucknow and Rajasthan, respectively, in what were his second and third appearances in the IPL. And thank god they did, for the 24-year-old southpaw proved his immense worth in the following match, with a breathtaking century against Chennai Super Kings at home in Mullanpur. Even as everyone around him crumbled for single-digit scores (incredibly, Arya was the only batsman to go past double digits in Punjab’s top-6 that day), a scintillating 39-ball hundred—studded with nine sixes, including one of the very first ball of the game — single-handedly took his team past 200 and handed them a narrow win. What more, the knock turned him into the poster boy of India’s next-gen overnight, the lad from Delhi now firmly on the radar of the national selectors.

Orange Crush: Abhishek Sharma, 24, Sunrisers Hyderabad

HYDERABAD HAD TO wait six matches for opener Abhishek Sharma to come good this season. But it was wholly worth the wait, for when he did, he made it count big time with what will go down as one of the greatest IPL innings of all time. His knock of 141 was not only the highest ever score by an Indian in the league, it stunned the sea≠sonís heavyweights, Punjab Kings, into submission, whose daunting total of 245 runs was overhauled with as many as nine balls to spare. Abhishek continues to live up to the reputation of T20 cricket’s new superstar on the horizon, having already hit two hundreds for India in the handful of international appearances he has made in the format. But the level of expectations from the 24-year-old lefty has now gone up by a notch or so, following his blistering century in the toughest T20 league in
the world.

Run Machine: Sai Sudharsan, 23, Gujarat Titans

DESPITE SCORING FIFTIES in his first two ODIs, during the second-string tour of South Africa immediately after the 2023 World Cup, Sai Sudharsan was dropped and hasn’t been looked at as an India opener since. That is perhaps set to change at the end of this IPL, for the lefty from Tamil Nadu has been the epitome of consistency for the current leaders of the league, Gujarat Titans (as of April 16). With nearly a fifty in every innings of the 2025 season thus far, the 23-year-old’s essay list reads such: 74, 63, 49, 5, 82 and 56. That’s 329 runs in six innings, just 28 runs shy of the current Orange Cap holder in Nicholas Pooran, who has played a game more than Sudharsan. His string of success alone explains why GT find themselves at the top of the heap, and if his classy display were to continue, the return to India’s colours will happen sooner rather than later.

Abhishek SharmaDelhi CapitalsDigvesh RathiGujarat TitansIndian cricketIPL 2025Karun NairLucknow Super GiantsPriyansh AryaPunjab KingsSai SudharsanSunrisers Hyderabad