Rahul Tripathi and the Cost of Having No Position

Rahul Tripathi reached 100 IPL matches in 2025, having played for Rising Pune Supergiant, Rajasthan Royals, Kolkata Knight Riders, Sunrisers Hyderabad and Chennai Super Kings. His career figures are 2,291 runs at 26.03, struck at 137.85, with twelve fifties and no hundred, and a highest score of 93 made in his very first season.

Set out like that it looks like an ordinary career, and in aggregate it is. What makes it worth examining is that the aggregate conceals a much sharper pattern. Tripathi's strike rate across nine seasons moved between 96.5 and 158.2, and it moved in near-perfect correlation with one variable: how high up the order he was asked to bat.

The seasons, and the shape they make

Season	Team	Inns	Runs	Avg	SR
2017	Rising Pune Supergiant	14	391	27.9	146.4
2018	Rajasthan Royals	12	226	25.1	135.3
2019	Rajasthan Royals	7	141	23.5	119.5
2020	Kolkata Knight Riders	11	230	23.0	127.1
2021	Kolkata Knight Riders	16	397	28.4	140.3
2022	Sunrisers Hyderabad	14	413	34.4	158.2
2023	Sunrisers Hyderabad	13	273	22.8	128.2
2024	Sunrisers Hyderabad	6	165	27.5	143.5
2025	Chennai Super Kings	5	55	11.0	96.5

Two seasons stand out at the top — 2017 and 2022 — and they have something in common that none of the others do. In 2017, as a 26-year-old rookie at Pune, Tripathi opened or batted at three and made 391 runs at 146.4 in a side that reached the final. In 2022, at Sunrisers, he batted in the top three again and made 413 at 158.2 with six scores over 30, the most efficient season of his career.

In between, and afterwards, he was mostly used as a floater — a batter sent in at three, four, five or six depending on the state of the match and the type of bowling. Those are the seasons with strike rates in the 120s.

Why the floating role is the problem

The floating batter is one of the more fashionable ideas in T20 coaching and it is not a stupid one. The logic is that a side gets more from matching batters to match-ups — a left-hander when the leg-spinner is on, a spin-hitter when two spinners are operating — than from a fixed order.

The cost is that nobody in a floating role gets to prepare for a specific job, and the players it damages most are batters like Tripathi, whose method depends on a particular set of conditions. Tripathi's strength is hitting pace on the up: a right-hander with fast hands who takes the ball early, drives square of the wicket and pulls anything short. That is a powerplay skill. It works best against a hard new ball with two fielders out, and it works worst against a spinner turning the ball away from him with a packed off-side field in the fourteenth over.

Send him in at three in the second over and he is a genuinely dangerous batter. Send him in at five in the thirteenth and he is a batter of moderate ability being asked to solve a problem he is not equipped for. The record shows both, in the same career, at the same age.

The 2022 season, and the near-miss on India

The 2022 campaign is the one that should have settled his role permanently. Tripathi made 413 runs at 34.4, striking at 158.2, hit 20 sixes, and was the most reliable Indian batter in a Sunrisers side that finished eighth. Ravi Shastri, among others, said publicly that season that he was knocking on the door of the India side.

The door opened, slightly and late. He made his T20I debut in January 2023 against Sri Lanka at Pune — India's 102nd men's T20I cap, awarded at 31 — and was dismissed for 5. He won a handful of caps in the following months and never established a place.

He is one of a long list of Indian batters of his generation for whom the competition for top-order white-ball places was simply too heavy: talented, in their thirties, with one outstanding IPL season behind them and no time to build a second. Suryakumar Yadav occupied the middle-order role Tripathi might have filled, and did so at a standard nobody in the country could match. The following IPL season Tripathi's strike rate fell thirty points to 128.2, and the argument was over almost as soon as it had started.

The two franchise stints that explain the rest

The Pune season is worth restoring because it was genuinely startling at the time. Tripathi was 26, uncapped, and had spent years in Maharashtra domestic cricket without attracting franchise interest. Rising Pune Supergiant — a side that existed for only two seasons, and which reached the 2017 final with a team built around Steve Smith and MS Dhoni — used him at the top of the order, and he responded with 391 runs at 146.4, including a 93 that remains the highest score of his career nine years later.

That a batter's best innings comes in his first season and is never approached again is not unusual in itself. What is unusual is how completely the conditions of that season were never recreated. Pune folded. Rajasthan bought him in 2018 and gave him twelve innings at 135.3, then seven at 119.5 in 2019 as he slid down the order.

The Kolkata years, 2020 and 2021, are the clearest illustration of the pattern. In 2020 he played eleven innings for 230 runs at 127.1. In 2021 he played sixteen for 397 at 140.3 — his second-highest aggregate — and Kolkata reached the final. Both seasons were played in the same squad under broadly the same management, and the difference between them was largely that in 2021 he spent more of it in the top three. He was then not retained.

The ending, so far

His 2024 season at Sunrisers was six innings for 165 runs at 143.5 — decent enough, but as a squad player in a team that had rebuilt its batting around Heinrich Klaasen and Travis Head, and which reached the final without needing him. Sunrisers released him. Chennai bought him for 2025, and that season was the worst of his career: five innings, 55 runs, a strike rate of 96.5, and no further selection.

The 96.5 is worth pausing on, because it is the floor of the pattern. A batter whose entire value is taking pace on early, given five innings in the middle order of a struggling side at 34, produced a strike rate lower than any he had managed in a full season by more than twenty points. It is the same story as 2019 and 2023, in a more extreme form and at an age where there is no season after it to recover in.

At 35 in the 2026 season, that leaves a career of nine seasons and one hundred matches with two very good years in it. The most likely reading is that the record is now closed, and it will read as a useful IPL professional rather than anything more.

What the record actually argues

The claim Tripathi's career supports is about squad management rather than about him, and it is a claim the competition's own selection behaviour keeps confirming.

Franchises consistently over-value flexibility in a batter and under-value specificity. A player who "can bat anywhere" is easier to fit into an XI, and is therefore attractive to a coach filling in a team sheet. But batting is a skill executed under specific conditions, and a batter who bats anywhere is, in practice, a batter who prepares for nothing and is judged on innings played in the conditions that suit him least.

Tripathi's two best seasons came in the two years he had a settled top-three role and no ambiguity about it. Everything else in the record is a franchise treating a powerplay batter as a utility. That is not a fringe observation: sides in the IPL do it every season, to two or three players each, and the resulting figures then get read as a verdict on the player rather than on the plan.

The honest conclusion about Tripathi himself is modest. He was not an outstanding T20 batter in any season — even 2022, his best, produced an average of 34.4 with no hundred. He was a genuinely good one when used correctly, and a fairly poor one otherwise, and his employers made the second choice more often than the first. In a competition that discards more talent than it develops, that is not an unusual career. It is just an unusually legible one.

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 franchise moves, the 2017 Rising Pune Supergiant run to the final and the 2025 release and signing follow official tournament and franchise records. The India debut and subsequent selection follow BCCI squad announcements. The account of batting positions by season is descriptive, drawn from published scorecards rather than computed from ball-by-ball data, and the correlation between position and strike rate is offered as a reading of the season figures rather than as a measured result.