Mohit Sharma: Net Bowler to 27 Wickets in a Season

In 2022, Mohit Sharma was employed by Gujarat Titans as a net bowler. He was thirty-three, he had played two matches of competitive Twenty20 cricket in the previous four years, and his job was to bowl at the batters who were actually in the squad. In 2023 he was a contracted player for the same franchise, took 27 wickets in fourteen matches at an average of 13.37, finished second in the tournament's wicket-taking list, and produced a five-wicket haul off fourteen deliveries in a knockout match. Then, in the final, he conceded ten runs from two balls and Gujarat lost the title.

There is no orderly way to narrate that. Most careers decline and stop; his declined, stopped, restarted at a higher level than it had ever reached, and ended its best season with the single most painful over any bowler bowled that year. What makes it worth examining rather than merely retelling is that all three acts were produced by the same skill, and the skill in question is the slower ball — a delivery that is either the most valuable thing a death bowler owns or the thing that loses him the match, depending on the day.

Act one: the best young seamer in the country

Mohit arrived from Haryana in the 2013 season and was immediately excellent. Fifteen matches for Chennai Super Kings, twenty wickets, an average of 16.30 and an economy rate of 6.43 — which, computed from the archive, is the best economy rate of his entire franchise career and would be a strong figure in any season of the competition's history. He was twenty-four, and he had walked into the most settled attack in the league and made himself its leading wicket-taker.

He followed it with 23 wickets in 2014, and in that year he did win the Purple Cap, topping the tournament's wicket-taking list. Two seasons, 43 wickets, a place in the India squad, and a reputation as the country's most promising death bowler. His 4 for 14 against Mumbai Indians at Dubai in April 2014 sits in the archive as one of the best returns of his career.

His forty-eight matches for Chennai Super Kings across that period produced 58 wickets at an average of 22.17 and an economy rate of 7.82, the best of any of his four employers. He was the beneficiary of a franchise that knew how to use a seamer with variations, and of surfaces at Chepauk that rewarded the ball held back.

Act two: the long disappearance

From 2015 the numbers move in one direction. Fourteen wickets in 2015 at 34.36. Thirteen in 2016 at 31.31 after a move to Kings XI Punjab. Thirteen in 2017 at 31.54. Then 2018: nine matches, seven wickets, an economy rate of 10.85, comfortably the worst season of his career. One match in 2019, one in 2020, and then nothing at all in 2021 or 2022 except the net-bowling contract.

His 37 matches for Punjab Kings produced 33 wickets at 34.52 and an economy rate of 9.20, and his nine for Delhi Capitals yielded three wickets at 100.67. Those are the figures of a bowler who has lost the thing that made him effective.

The international career followed the same curve on a compressed timescale. He played for India across 2013 to 2015, was in the squad for the 2015 World Cup, and was out of the reckoning by the end of that year. Twenty-six one-day internationals and eight Twenty20 Internationals is the whole of it, and by twenty-six he was finished at that level.

The technical explanation is not mysterious. Mohit bowls in the low 130s in kilometres per hour and always did; his value was never pace but the difference between his stock ball and his slower ball, and the accuracy to bowl either into a yorker length. When batters worked out the slower ball — and by 2016 they had, because the whole competition had spent three seasons watching him bowl it — a medium-pacer without deception is the most hittable bowler on the field. His economy rate through those years tells the story precisely: 8.44, 8.39, 8.98, 10.85.

Act three: 2023

What changed in 2023 was the slower ball, remade. He came back with a version held deeper in the fingers, delivered at a wider range of speeds, and disguised well enough that batters committed to the shot before the pace registered. The results were immediate and absurd.

Fourteen matches, 265 deliveries, 27 wickets, an average of 13.37 and an economy rate of 8.17. An average of 13.37 for a death bowler is not a normal figure; it is the figure of a bowler taking a wicket almost every ten deliveries in the phase where batters are trying to hit every ball. He took four wickets in a match three times — against Sunrisers Hyderabad, against Lucknow Super Giants, and in the game against Punjab Kings that turned his season into a story people were following.

Then, in Qualifier 2 against Mumbai Indians at the Narendra Modi Stadium on 26 May, he took 5 for 10 off fourteen deliveries. A maiden five-wicket haul, at thirty-four, in a knockout match, off little more than two overs. It remains the best return of his career by a wide margin, and it put Gujarat into the final.

He finished the season second in the wicket-taking list, behind his own teammate Mohammed Shami, who took 28 and won the Purple Cap. Two Gujarat seamers at the top of the charts, one of them a net bowler eleven months earlier.

The two balls

Gujarat and Chennai Super Kings met in the final at Ahmedabad on the reserve day, after rain had cut the chase to 171 from fifteen overs. Chennai needed thirteen from the last over. Mohit bowled it.

He bowled four excellent deliveries — the equation came down to ten needed from two balls, which for a bowler of his kind is a position of considerable strength. Ravindra Jadeja hit the fifth for six and the sixth for four, and Chennai won their fifth title by five wickets on the revised target.

There is no way to write that as anything other than what it was. He had bowled the best season of his life, had been the reason Gujarat were in the final at all, and lost it in two deliveries to a batter who played two extraordinary shots. He has spoken about it since with more equanimity than most would manage.

What followed was the ordinary ending. Thirteen wickets in 2024 at an economy rate of 10.90, two in 2025 at 10.28, the figures of a thirty-six-year-old whose margin has closed again and this time will not reopen. His 26 matches for Gujarat Titans across those seasons produced 40 wickets at 19.65, which is an excellent aggregate held up almost entirely by the one year.

What the career adds up to

The full franchise record, computed through the 2025 season, reads 120 matches, 2,403 deliveries, 3,513 runs and 134 wickets at an economy rate of 8.77 and an average of 26.22. That average is better than a lot of more celebrated bowlers manage, and the reason is a strike rate of a wicket every 17.9 balls — the sharpest in my reading of any seamer with his workload in the competition, and a direct product of bowling almost exclusively in the phase where batters take risks.

The phase split confirms it: 807 deliveries at the death for 63 wickets, a wicket every 12.8 balls, at an economy rate of 10.27. Expensive, lethal, and exactly the trade a captain makes when he hands the ball to a specialist in the eighteenth over. His most frequent victim was Ambati Rayudu, dismissed seven times in 49 deliveries.

The honest summary is that Mohit Sharma had two great seasons ten years apart and seven ordinary ones in between, and that both great seasons came from the same delivery being briefly ahead of the batters. That is a narrower career than the 2013 and 2014 numbers promised, and a much larger one than the 2018 numbers suggested was still possible.

It is also, in its way, the most encouraging career in this competition's history for anyone in the middle of a decline. Mohit Sharma was a net bowler at thirty-three and the second-highest wicket-taker in the Indian Premier League at thirty-four. Whatever else the record says, it says that the door does not always close.

Sources and method

The 2013 to 2015 international appearances, the 2014 Purple Cap, the 2023 season's placement in the wicket-taking list behind Mohammed Shami, and the sequence of the 2023 final — a target revised to 171 from fifteen overs, thirteen needed from the last over, and Ravindra Jadeja's six and four from the final two balls — are the published record, as is his 2022 engagement as a net bowler. Career totals, per-season figures, phase splits, strike rates, dot-ball rates and head-to-head figures against individual batters are computed from the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive, which covers the Indian Premier League from 2008; the figures here run through the 2025 season, and small differences against published aggregates reflect scoring conventions for byes, leg byes and no-balls. The technical account of the slower ball is an argument from the figures and from how he was used, not a claim about coaching he received.