Yusuf Pathan Hit Sixes Before Anyone Used Him Right

In March 2010 at the Brabourne Stadium, Yusuf Pathan chased 213 against Mumbai Indians and got Rajasthan Royals to within four runs of it almost single-handed, making a hundred from 37 balls. It was the fastest century the Indian Premier League had seen. Rajasthan lost. Two months later he took 210 from a Duleep Trophy final. Later that year he made 123 not out from 96 balls in an ODI against New Zealand, arriving with India five down and 128 still needed.

By any reasonable projection, that year should have launched a decade at the centre of India's white-ball batting. Instead Pathan played 57 ODIs and 22 T20 internationals in total, spread thinly across eight years, and finished with international averages of 27 and 18. He owns two World Cup winner's medals and appeared in the finals of neither tournament's decisive phase in a role anybody had planned for him.

The argument of his career is not that he was underrated. It is that he was a specialist in a discipline that had no accepted position in a batting order yet, and by the time the position existed — the number five or six who is picked purely to hit sixes in the last six overs — he was thirty-four and out of the reckoning.

Two finals, three years apart

Pathan's international career began in the most conspicuous match available: the final of the inaugural World Twenty20 in Johannesburg, against Pakistan, on his debut. He was sent out to open, which is an extraordinary decision to make about a player who had never batted in an international, and he made 15. India won.

Three years later he was in the 2011 World Cup squad that won at home, though he did not feature in the knockout matches. Between them sits the innings that best defines his one-day cricket. Chasing 316 against New Zealand at Bengaluru on 7 December 2010, India were 188 for 5 in the thirty-fourth over. Pathan made 123 not out from 96 balls with seven fours and seven sixes, adding an unbroken 133 with Saurabh Tiwary, and India won with seven balls to spare. It was his maiden one-day hundred and he was Player of the Match.

Note where he was batting. Number six, in a chase, with the innings already half gone — the position a side gives a bowling all-rounder who can slog, not its most explosive hitter. He was being used as a contingency, and on the one occasion the contingency was needed at length he won the match.

The 2008 final, and the shape of an all-rounder

The franchise career started at Rajasthan Royals, and its high point was the first season. In the 2008 final at the DY Patil Stadium, Pathan took 3 for 22 with his off-breaks and then made 56 from 39 balls as Rajasthan chased down Chennai's total off the final ball. He was central to the most improbable title win the competition has produced — a squad assembled cheaply and coached by Shane Warne into a side that beat every franchise with more money.

That performance also shows what he was at his best: a genuine two-way cricketer. The bowling is regularly forgotten because he took almost no wickets late in his career, but through 2008 to 2011 his off-spin was a real option — flat, quick through the air, hard to get away on a slow surface — and he took 33 ODI wickets alongside the runs.

Kolkata Knight Riders bought him after 2010 at what was then a very large fee, and he stayed seven seasons, winning titles in 2012 and 2014. He finished with more than 3,200 IPL runs across twelve seasons at Rajasthan, Kolkata and Sunrisers Hyderabad.

Why nobody could place him

The tactical problem Pathan presented is worth setting out carefully, because it recurs.

He was not a top-order batter. His technique against the new ball was not tight enough, and his method — a very long backswing, a strong bottom hand, and a preference for hitting straight — required the field to be spread and the ball to be older. He was not a middle-order accumulator either; he did not rotate strike well and his scoring was almost entirely in boundaries. And he was not quite a front-line bowler, so he could not be picked as a bowler who bats.

What he was is a batter who, given twenty to thirty balls at the end of an innings against a field with five men on the boundary, would produce forty or fifty runs more often than almost anyone in India. That is now an established job — it is what Hardik Pandya does, what Rinku Singh was picked for, what every franchise auction values at several crore. In 2010 there was no consensus that it was a job at all, and the default response to a player who could not be classified was to bat him at seven and blame him for the strike rate.

The 37-ball hundred is the clearest evidence of the mismatch. Rajasthan were 66 for 4 in the tenth over of a chase of 213 — a match already gone — and Pathan reached fifty from 21 balls, then took sixteen more for the next fifty, nine fours and eight sixes in all. He was run out in the eighteenth over and Mumbai won by four runs. Whatever that innings proved about him, it changed nothing about how he was used afterwards.

The domestic evidence, and Baroda

There is a version of Pathan's record that treats the international failure as proof he was a limited player, and the first-class numbers make that reading difficult. The 210 not out from the 2010 Duleep Trophy final, made from 190 balls, is not a slog: it is a long innings played at a good rate in a match of consequence. He had a substantial career for Baroda across formats and was, with his brother Irfan Pathan, the main reason a modest state side was competitive for a decade.

The Pathan brothers are worth a note in their own right. Two boys from a mosque caretaker's family in Vadodara both played for India — Irfan as a left-arm swing bowler who took a Test hat-trick, Yusuf as a power hitter — which is one of the more unlikely double acts Indian cricket has produced, and both of them arrived through the domestic system rather than any academy.

The ending, and what it cost

Pathan's last international appearance came in 2012, at twenty-nine. He kept playing franchise cricket until 2019 and retired from all cricket in February 2021.

In 2018 he served a five-month suspension after testing positive for terbutaline, which he said had entered his system through a cough syrup taken for a chest infection; the Board of Control for Cricket in India accepted that the ingestion was inadvertent and imposed the reduced sanction accordingly. It came near the end of the playing career rather than in the middle of it, and it belongs in the record without being the story of it.

The measure of the career

The honest summary is a player of one enormous skill, deployed by teams that had not yet built the structures to use it. Two World Cup medals, an IPL final won with bat and ball, the fastest hundred in the competition's history for several years, a Duleep Trophy final double century, and an international record that reads worse than the player was.

It would be neater to conclude that Pathan was simply ahead of his time, and there is a version of that which is true. But the fuller version includes his own limitations: a batter with that much power who could not rotate strike or defend a good ball would have been left out of a modern side too, just at a different position in the order. What changed since is not only tactical fashion but the standard of the specialist — today's finishers can also run and defend.

What his career does establish is that the position existed before the game recognised it. Somebody had to demonstrate that thirty balls of pure hitting at the end of an innings was worth a place, and in Indian cricket that demonstration was mostly Yusuf Pathan's, delivered in matches his side often lost anyway. Career figures are on the Yusuf Pathan profile.

Sources and method

Match figures, dates and career aggregates are taken from published scorecards and official BCCI, IPL and ICC records, cross-checked against contemporary reports of the matches described. The account of the 2018 anti-doping sanction follows the BCCI's published statement at the time. Assessments of how he was used in batting orders are the author's reading of the record.