It is 2026, and six-hitting in T20s has almost completely shifted from the art end of the spectrum to the science end. Hitting slot balls for six? Even tailenders can do that.
Even so, a slot-ball six comes along every now and then, and makes you sit up straight after hours spent in an unedifying, semi-comatose slouch on your sofa. On Saturday night, during the IPL 2026 curtain-raiser between Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) and Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, Devdutt Padikkal hit a shot just like that.
It came off a slot ball, as previously mentioned, and a slot ball angling into Padikkal's pads. It was as gift-wrapped a ball as Jaydev Unadkat could have bowled, but sometimes a bad ball is lent dignity by the purity of the shot that meets it.
Padikkal has always been a crisp, effortless timer of the ball. Seldom, however, has he applied that gift in the way he did now to flick this ball high over the backward square-leg boundary. He had never previously hit a six in the first three balls of any of his T20 innings (where ball-by-ball data is available). He had now hit one off his first ball of IPL 2026.
As unprecedented as this shot was, it wasn't entirely unexpected, because this is the domestic season Padikkal had enjoyed in the lead-up to this IPL: 543 runs at an average of 60.33 in the Ranji Trophy, including a double-hundred in the semi-finals; 725 at 90.62 in the 50-overs Vijay Hazare Trophy, with four hundreds in nine innings; and 309 at 61.8 and a strike rate of 167.02 in the 20-overs Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy.
Padikkal is still only 25, but he has had a lot of eyes on him for a long, long time. He has been in and around India's Test squad in the last two years, and if he has not been part of their white-ball plans, it's mostly because there is such a glut of white-ball batting talent in the country.
Something, however, seems to have shifted within him over the last year-and-a-half or so. Padikkal has always had the ability to hit that kind of ball for six, but perhaps only recently has he found the icy, ruthless clarity to be able to do it off his first ball.
Signs of this were already evident in IPL 2025, when he returned to RCB, his home franchise, and played an important role at No. 3, scoring 247 runs in ten innings at a strike rate of 150.6 - a significant improvement from the 123.14 he had managed over his five previous IPL seasons.
Padikkal had missed last season's playoffs with a hamstring injury, however, and RCB had strengthened their top-order contingent at the 2026 auction, signing Venkatesh Iyer, an IPL winner with Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) in 2024 and an IPL centurion to boot. In the lead-up to this season, it seemed as if RCB had a difficult call to make at No. 3, between two tall left-hand batters with long levers.
With that first-ball six, Padikkal made it clear why he had been preferred to start the first game of the season.
And if one ball isn't a convincing enough argument, how about three fours and three sixes in your first 11 balls? How about 61 off 26 balls to set your team up to chase down 202 with 26 balls remaining?
This was a Padikkal the world had seldom seen before. This is a batter known for his economy of movement, for letting the ball come to him, and stroking it with languid ease. Now he was stepping out, making room, dropping onto his back knee, and reaching out to carve a wide-line ball over a leaping deep point. Now he was stepping across his stumps pre-delivery to pull a marginally short-of-length ball past midwicket. Now he was stepping out, holding his shape, and clipping a slower ball with minimal effort over the wide long-on boundary.
He was doing all this before he had even spent ten balls at the crease.
"Outstanding knock," Virat Kohli, who put on 101 off just 45 balls with Padikkal, said of his partner's innings. "Right from the word go. I mean, I had plans of going aggressive in the powerplay, but when I saw him play, I was like, keep putting him back on strike and hit the odd boundary here and there.
"So, yeah, he completely took the game away from the opposition. That one shot he hit off a slower ball over mid-on for six, at that time I told him, just keep going on. You're hitting the ball amazingly well, and just keep pushing it and take the game away from the opposition, to finish with 25, 26 balls to spare, we'll get up on the net run rate as well.
"His knock was tremendous. I've seen him at close quarters, and the skill he has, and now he's applying it, and this is at the back of a great domestic season with the red ball. His timing with the ball was phenomenal, his head positions, his balance, absolutely world class. I know what he can do with the bat if he's confident, and tonight was just a display of his sheer talent."
This wasn't the languid Padikkal we have known and admired. This was an all-action Padikkal imposing himself on a contest, and doing so with such chilling certainty that the superstar at the other end decided that the best place for him was, in fact, the other end.