Tilak Varma Keeps Not Getting Out

There is a statistical oddity at the centre of Tilak Varma's career that is easy to miss and hard to explain away. He has two Twenty20 international centuries. Both are unbeaten. His match-winning innings in the 2025 Asia Cup final was unbeaten. Across Twenty20 cricket generally he has been left not out well over a dozen times, and the effect on his numbers is dramatic: a batting average above 43 in the format, which for a middle-order player striking at better than 144 is not a normal combination.

The obvious retort is that not-outs inflate averages, and they do. But the more interesting question is why the not-outs happen at all, and the answer is a description of how he plays rather than a quirk of arithmetic. Varma is a finisher whose entire method is organised around still being at the crease when the match ends, and in a format that rewards controlled violence over sustained accumulation, that turns out to be a distinct and useful skill.

Three consecutive hundreds, and where the last one came from

The clearest demonstration arrived in late 2024. Varma made 107 not out from 56 balls at Centurion, then 120 not out at Johannesburg three days later, both in Twenty20 internationals against South Africa. He then went to the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy for Hyderabad and made 151 not out, becoming the first player in men's Twenty20 cricket to score three consecutive centuries in the format.

Three hundreds in a row is remarkable in any format and close to unheard of in Twenty20, where an innings can be over in twelve balls and where nobody bats long enough often enough for the sequence to be available. That all three were unbeaten is the part worth pausing on. In each case he arrived, established, accelerated and was still there at the close. He did not throw the innings away after reaching a landmark, which is the standard fate of Twenty20 hundreds.

His record against South Africa specifically remains lopsided — a large share of his T20I runs have come against them, at an average north of 60 — and honesty requires acknowledging that a career-defining sequence against one opponent is not the same as a career-defining sequence against everyone. But the method visible in those innings is the method he has since used against better-varied attacks.

The Asia Cup final

On 28 September 2025, India chased 147 to beat Pakistan and win a ninth Asia Cup title. Varma came in with the innings in ruins — two down for 10 inside the third over, and soon three down for 20 — and finished on 69 not out, taking the Player of the Match award.

An innings of 69 in a chase of 147 is not a highlight-reel score, and in a normal match it would be a footnote. In that match it was the whole thing, because the situation demanded something Twenty20 batters are rarely asked for: absorb a collapse, do not panic, do not attempt to restore the required rate in one over, and stay in. Wickets kept falling around him. He kept batting.

This is the innings that makes the not-out pattern look like a method rather than luck. A batter whose instinct in trouble is to hit his way out gets dismissed and the chase is over. A batter whose instinct is to reduce the risk per ball until a partnership forms, and then to accelerate off the back of it, ends up not out with the game won. Varma has done the second thing repeatedly, in matches of different sizes, and the record is beginning to read as a temperament rather than a run of results.

The Mumbai Indians role, and what it asks of him

Varma has played his entire IPL career for Mumbai Indians, joining as a young unknown and being trusted with the number three position more or less immediately — a place normally reserved for a side's most established batter. Around 1,850 runs across five seasons, in a batting order that has also contained Rohit Sharma, Suryakumar Yadav and Hardik Pandya, represents a substantial share of the workload for a player still in his early twenties. He reached his maiden IPL century in April 2026, an unbeaten 101 from 45 balls against Gujarat Titans in Ahmedabad.

The job at three for Mumbai is specific and awkward. If the openers have gone early, he is a rebuilder. If they have flown, he is an accelerator with nine overs to hit through. He has to be able to switch between those two briefs on the walk to the crease, and the not-out habit is at least partly the product of a side that keeps asking him to do the harder one. Mumbai's batting has never lacked hitters; what it has periodically lacked is someone in the top four who does not need momentum to function.

The seasonal detail matters here, because the first of those campaigns tells you most about him. He was bought ahead of the 2022 season and made 397 runs in a year Mumbai finished bottom of the table — a side losing almost every week, with an unsettled order and nothing to play for after the first month. A young batter's figures in a season like that are usually the first thing to collapse, because there is no platform to bat on and no reason to be careful. His did not. He followed it with 416 runs from thirteen innings in 2024, with three fifties, and by the middle of the decade his aggregate had passed 1,850 at an average close to 36 — a figure that would be respectable for an experienced middle-order player and is unusual for someone who arrived at nineteen.

The international ladder, and the format that is missing

Varma made his Twenty20 international debut against the West Indies in August 2023 and his one-day debut against Bangladesh a month later. The two records have diverged sharply since. His Twenty20 international batting now runs to close to 1,400 runs at better than 44, with the two hundreds and a best of 120 not out — numbers that put him among the more productive players in that format for India in his generation.

The one-day record is a handful of caps and a single fifty, and he has not yet played a Test. Both gaps are worth stating rather than glossing, because the way a career is judged in Indian cricket still runs through the longer formats, and a player who is indispensable in Twenty20 and absent everywhere else has an obvious ceiling on how he will eventually be remembered. He has scored heavily in domestic first-class and one-day cricket for Hyderabad, so the case is being built; it simply has not been tested at the level that decides these things.

Where the record is thin

An honest assessment has to note the parts of the case that are not yet made. Varma's red-ball career at international level does not exist in any meaningful volume, and his one-day international record remains a small sample. He has had lean stretches in the IPL as well as productive ones, and a player in his early twenties with five franchise seasons behind him has not yet been through the phase where opposition analysts have properly solved him.

There is also a fair question about the not-outs themselves. A finisher's average benefits structurally from the format — you are dismissed once per innings at most, and if your job is to be there at the end, you will accumulate not-outs the way an opener accumulates dismissals. Varma's average is genuinely inflated by that, and anyone comparing it directly to an opener's is comparing two different measurements. The claim worth making is narrower: that the number of not-outs is unusual even for a middle-order batter, and that it points at something about how he manages risk.

What the pattern is actually evidence of

Twenty20 batting is usually discussed in terms of strike rate, and the game's evolution over two decades has been a long argument for hitting more often and earlier. That argument has been won, mostly correctly. What it has obscured is that the format still produces a large number of matches decided in the last three overs by a single wicket falling or not falling, and in those matches the batter who remains is worth more than the batter who scored faster and departed.

Varma has built a young career on the second half of that trade-off. His strike rate is good rather than extraordinary. His control in a collapse is the outlier. In the current India Twenty20 side — packed with players who can strike at 170 and short of players who can be relied on when three wickets have gone for 20 — that has been enough to make a left-hander from Hyderabad the most trusted man in the middle order before his mid-twenties.

Whether it lasts depends on things nobody can see yet: how his method holds when the ball is turning, whether the Mumbai order keeps giving him the same job, whether he gets a run in the longer formats. But the argument his record makes so far is clear and slightly counter-cultural. In a format that celebrates the batter who takes the game away, Varma has made his name by being the one who does not give it back.