Devdutt Padikkal Rebuilt His Game at 25

Most batters do not change. A method is set by about 22 — the trigger movement, the shots trusted under pressure, the balls left alone — and thereafter a career consists of getting better at executing it against better bowlers. When a player's numbers move sharply after 24, the usual explanation is a change of role or a change of pitch rather than a change of technique. Genuine remakes are rare enough that most careers cited as examples turn out, on inspection, to be nothing of the kind.

Devdutt Padikkal is one of the real ones. He arrived at Royal Challengers Bengaluru in 2020 and made 473 runs at a strike rate of 124.8. In 2026, for the same franchise, he made 464 runs at 168.7. Those are almost identical run totals from almost identical innings counts, produced by two visibly different cricketers, and the second version reached a fifty in twenty balls, which the first version could not have done in forty.

The batter he was

Padikkal's first two seasons made him the most talked-about young Indian opener in the competition, and it is worth remembering how good the reception was, because the criticism came later.

In 2020, aged 20, he made 473 runs in fifteen innings for Bengaluru, was the leading run-scorer among uncapped players, and won the emerging player award. In 2021 he made 411 including his only IPL hundred, 101 not out against Rajasthan Royals. Both seasons featured a left-hander with an orthodox high elbow, a clean cover drive and an obvious appetite for the long innings. He looked, and the comparison was made constantly, like a Test opener who happened to be playing T20.

The problem was the second number in each line. Those seasons were struck at 124.8 and 125.3. Eight sixes in fifteen innings, then fourteen in fourteen. For an opener taking first use of a powerplay with two fielders out, that is a rate the competition had already begun to price as a liability rather than a foundation.

Season	Team	Inns	Runs	Avg	SR	4s	6s
2020	Royal Challengers Bengaluru	15	473	31.5	124.8	51	8
2021	Royal Challengers Bengaluru	14	411	31.6	125.3	44	14
2022	Rajasthan Royals	17	376	22.1	122.9	40	14
2023	Rajasthan Royals	11	261	26.1	130.5	31	6
2024	Lucknow Super Giants	7	38	5.4	71.7	3	0
2025	Royal Challengers Bengaluru	10	247	27.4	150.6	21	14
2026	Royal Challengers Bengaluru	15	464	33.1	168.7	49	24

The four seasons that nearly ended it

The middle of that table is a career going quietly wrong. Padikkal moved to Rajasthan for 2022 and 2023, where he played 28 innings for 637 runs at strike rates of 122.9 and 130.5, and where he was progressively shifted out of the top of the order. The criticism sharpened accordingly: a batter who neither scored quickly nor, at an average of 22.1 in 2022, made enough runs to justify not scoring quickly.

Then came 2024 at Lucknow Super Giants, which is one of the worst seasons in the record of any established IPL batter: seven innings, 38 runs, an average of 5.4, a strike rate of 71.7, no fifties, no sixes, three fours in total. Not a lean patch — a collapse. He was 23, four years into a career that had started as well as any Indian batter's of his generation, and he was averaging five.

What actually changed

The remake happened between 2024 and 2025, back at Bengaluru, and it was technical rather than attitudinal. This is the part of the story that matters, because "he decided to be more aggressive" explains nothing — plenty of batters decide that and simply get out faster.

The changes reported at the time and visible in his batting since were about access to areas rather than intent. A more open stance and a stronger base gave him the leg-side hitting he had never had; a higher backlift and an earlier trigger let him get under the ball and hit down the ground rather than only through the covers. The consequence shows up cleanly in the six count. Across his first four seasons — 57 innings — he hit 42 sixes. In 2025 and 2026, across 25 innings, he hit 38.

The four-hitting did not go away either, which is the significant part. He struck 49 fours in 2026, his highest total in any season, alongside the 24 sixes. That combination is the signature of a batter who has added a scoring option rather than replaced one: the cover-driving opener is still there, and there is now a straight hitter attached to him.

The 2026 season in detail

His 2026 campaign was the best of his career by every measure except the century column. He made 464 runs from fifteen innings at 33.1, struck at 168.7, and hit three fifties — 61 from 26 balls against Sunrisers Hyderabad in a chase of over 200, 50 from 29 against Chennai Super Kings, and 55 from 27 against Gujarat Titans, the last of which took twenty balls to reach fifty and was the fastest of his career.

Read those three innings together and a role becomes visible. Padikkal's function in the 2026 Bengaluru order was to take the powerplay away from the opposition in the first four overs so that Virat Kohli and Rajat Patidar could bat through the middle. That is close to the opposite of the job he was given in 2020, when he was the one asked to bat through while others accelerated, and it is the job the competition now actually rewards.

Bengaluru won the title in 2025 and retained it in 2026, beating Gujarat Titans in the final at Ahmedabad to become only the third side to defend the trophy. Padikkal was not the leading figure in either campaign — Kohli's unbeaten 75 settled the 2026 final — but the side had a settled shape that his batting was a real part of, which is more than could be said for any of the four seasons before it.

The honest limits

Two things need saying against the argument. First, the average has not moved much. Padikkal's career figure is 26.71, and even in his transformed 2026 season it was 33.1 — respectable rather than good for a top-order batter. The remake bought him a great deal of strike rate and comparatively little consistency, and a batter averaging 33 at the top of the order remains a player a side can drop.

Second, his career IPL total of 2,270 runs from 89 innings, with one hundred and fourteen fifties, is a solid record and not much more. The remake made him useful again to a good franchise; it did not by itself make him a substantially different batter in terms of output.

The Test career that arrived anyway

There is a coda that complicates the neat franchise story, and it is the best thing in his record. Padikkal has played Test cricket for India — he debuted against England at Dharamsala in March 2024, making 65, and toured Australia later that year — and in August 2026, at Galle, he made his maiden Test century: 167 batting at number three against Sri Lanka, followed by 44 in the second innings.

That innings was the highest score by an Indian left-hander at the ground, and among maiden Test hundreds by Indians in Sri Lanka only Vinod Kambli's double-century stands above it. It also put him in a very short list of Indian left-handers to make a Test century at number three, a position occupied in living memory by Rahul Dravid and Cheteshwar Pujara.

The reason this complicates the argument is that it is the classical batter succeeding, not the remade one. The high elbow, the cover drive and the appetite for a long innings that made him look miscast in T20 in 2021 are exactly the qualities that produced 167 at Galle. So the honest version of his career is not that he replaced an obsolete method with a modern one. It is that he kept the first method, which turned out to have a Test century in it, and built a second one alongside it for the franchise game.

Why it is worth writing down

The interesting thing about Padikkal is not that he got better. It is that his career runs directly against the received wisdom about how T20 batters develop.

The standard account holds that power is largely innate — that a batter either clears the boundary or does not, and that coaching can improve placement, fitness and decision-making but cannot manufacture range. Padikkal's record is a counter-example that is hard to argue away, because the two halves of it were produced by the same player, at the same franchise, at the same venue, within six years, with the same fielding restrictions. He hit eight sixes in fifteen innings in 2020 and 24 in fifteen innings in 2026.

Whatever the ceiling on his career turns out to be, that specific fact is the useful one for anyone thinking about how Indian cricket develops T20 batters. The 21-year-old who looked like a Test batter in a franchise league was not miscast in the format; he was an unfinished cricketer, and the finishing took four bad seasons and a technical rebuild the received wisdom said would not work. That he turned out to be a Test batter as well is the part nobody predicted from either half of the evidence.

Sources and method

IPL season and career figures are taken from official competition records and cross-checked against this site's own match dataset. The 2026 fifties against Sunrisers Hyderabad, Chennai Super Kings and Gujarat Titans, and the 2021 century against Rajasthan Royals, follow official scorecards. Test details — the 2024 debut at Dharamsala and the 167 at Galle in August 2026 — are taken from official scorecards and match reporting. The description of the technical changes between 2024 and 2025 is drawn from contemporary reporting and coaching comment rather than measurement, and is presented as description rather than a computed finding. No figure in this article has been derived from ball-by-ball data.