It’s tempting to marvel at the sheer violence of Mukul Choudhary’s seven six-hits, but what truly held the room was the stillness around them. Between deliveries, between overs, and between each shot he decided to unleash, there was a calmness that didn’t seem to change with the scoreline or the stage of the chase. For a player in only his third IPL appearance, the composure looked strangely complete. Mukul is 21, and the game will teach him plenty as he keeps stepping up, yet even at this early point he has clearly worked something out in his own mind. He understands that pressure is part of the job, but he’s learning to “distract from it”—not by pretending the moment isn’t big, but by finding a way to let confidence and skill overrule the noise.
With the chase sitting at 104/5 and Lucknow needing 78 from seven overs, the innings required exactly that kind of head. Over the next 12 balls, Mukul faced just one delivery, watching Ayush Badoni depart and Mohammed Shami arrive at the crease. The rest of the batting order that followed had not even reached 20 runs in their T20 careers, which only underlined how much of the responsibility had quietly settled on Mukul’s shoulders. When Ayush “bhai” got out, Mukul said, he understood that the job would fall to him—he wanted the game to be kept close and wasn’t consumed by whether the result would swing right away.
He then took on the task properly, striking on 25 of the next 30 deliveries. Two overs in succession, he managed to keep the required rate from exploding: on the fifth ball of one set, he only nudged a single, giving Avesh Khan a chance to keep going. The same was not done in the 19th over. Cam Green, pitching the final ball short and slow, offered the exact kind of pace to make a statement, and Mukul punished it with a six that sailed over mid-wicket. The method, as simple as it sounded afterward, was to shrink the margin first and then hunt the strike—clear thinking rather than frantic hitting.
Mukul also admitted that he had been prone to overthinking his batting right up to the night before. On the team bus to the stadium, Rishabh Pant advised him against trying to reinvent himself with “this and that” and instead to hit the ball exactly as he saw it. Once the match began, Mukul’s response looked like the product of that advice. Still, his early timing suggested he was a touch out of depth against what the bowlers were offering—he struggled to read Sunil Narine and was checked by Vaibhav Arora. Yet he didn’t lose his shape. When the equation became 6 from 9 and 50 required off 21, he showed the type of foresight that comes from preparing for options rather than waiting for luck: he went for another yorker, stepped two paces aside, and flicked it with authority. The ball flew like a helicopter to the long-on fence, and later he said he would dedicate the knock to MS Dhoni.
Then Kartik Tyagi entered the spell, rolling his fingers over the ball and hoping the pitch would do enough on its own. Mukul’s bat speed met the challenge with force, turning what might have been a safer contact into an aggressive swat over cover. It was obvious he didn’t hit sixes the way everyone expects; he was carving out his own angles and timing windows. When Cam Green returned for the crucial 19th over, Mukul likely anticipated more of the slower bouncers. The first one came with an edge and a top-tinged danger, but he survived. The next delivery missed the pull and struck him on the back. Without hesitation, he requested a glove change immediately—pressure can be sweaty, even for calm minds, but what followed didn’t match the idea of nerves.
In ice-cool fashion, like a finisher who has done this before, Mukul steered the next ball to the long-leg boundary. After that, he didn’t just take whatever came on the last ball—he cleared the field with a leg-side hit, the ball striking the sweet spot and thundering over for six as cheers rose from the opposition crowd. Even with that surge, he looked just as composed before the six as he did after it. Between deliveries, he moved to the side of the crease, dropped into a crouch, took time for deep breaths, and emptied his mind of the extra thoughts.
Avesh Khan had plenty to say during the moment, and Mukul listened to some of it while refusing other input, choosing when to accept guidance and when to keep his own focus. Up close, the details were easy to spot: a few steps aside, adjusting the spacing of his grip, taking a handful of breaths, tapping each glove, and then returning to the center of attention. At times he would even pause to count the fielders—pointing and numbering them mentally—before stepping back into his stance. That ability to detach from the frenzy and then attach to the next ball, filling the gap between deliveries with a short private ritual, became one of the defining features of the chase.
He wasn’t perfect—there were moments of mis-hit and hesitation—but he stayed anchored to the plan. He had to keep going even as the sweat threatened to change the gloves, and he carried on to finish the job. The temperament was the standout trait in a young cricketer, and alongside it were the wrists and the bat speed that make the big hits possible. The decisive “sucker punch” arrived with a wild, clean strike over covers, down on one knee, powered by his wrists. His front leg cleared and then returned into position after the ball had already raced away, balancing his tilted frame as if he had rehearsed the movement. When the moment was complete, Mukul stood up, walked back to his mark, tapped his chest, raised his glove toward the skies, and let the scene settle.
About half an hour after walking off the pitch with the winning run, he reached the press-conference room. He adjusted the microphone, took a long sigh, and then another deep breath—this time, the kind that comes without pressure. He had already done plenty of interviews that day, so this one felt like just another conversation. Mukul didn’t seem bothered by the spotlight; he compared it to the calm he had shown during the chase. For him, the attention was an opportunity to carve out his own name and identity. His name, he said, roughly translates to “blossoming,” and what he grows into from here should be worth watching.
