At 6.24pm, in front of a packed Sunday crowd at Chepauk, Urvil Patel charged to a record-equalling, 13-ball fifty and didn't even raise his bat. He folded his hands in silent prayer and pulled out a note from his pocket, which said: "This is for you Papa."
While his celebrations were subtle, his ball-striking was anything but. Urvil faced 23 balls and hit ten of them to the boundary or over it to ransack 65 runs. His eight sixes - all in the leg-side arc between deep square leg and wide long-on - reverberated across Chepauk. The crunching sound that his bat made when it met the ball rivalled the loud Tamil songs played by the DJ.
"It was quite rowdy in there," Jamie Overton said after CSK's victory. "That's the way he (Urvil) plays and he plays the same at training. So it was only a matter of time before he did that in a game. He was disappointed when he hit that for four when he could have had six in a row. The way these youngsters go about their cricket - they just take the game on from ball one and are not afraid."
Urvil actually threw his head back in disappointment after he failed to clear the boundary off the final delivery of the powerplay from LSG's mystery spinner Digvesh Rathi. He had just gone 6,6,6,6,6,4,6 in seven legal balls across the fifth and sixth overs but still wanted more.
Chennai Super Kings (CSK) were woefully off the pace with the bat in IPL 2025, and have been especially off the pace in high chases for eight years. Before Sunday, they had last chased a target of more than 180 way back in 2018. Remember MS Dhoni vs Corey Anderson in Bengaluru? After 14 failed attempts, CSK finally got the job done, thanks to Urvil's ruthless intent to launch every ball into orbit. His execution on Sunday was just as ruthless as his intent.
The good-length deliveries that LSG bowled seemed to have an effect when Sanju Samson and Ruturaj Gaikwad were in the middle. Rathi even rattled Samson's stumps with a slider that pitched on a good length and skidded on. But here was Urvil backing his strengths and hoicking good-length deliveries over the leg side with an unfettered bat-swing. Other batters may have been content to knock such balls into the off side for singles.
CSK's batting coach Mike Hussey, who was miked up around the time, said Urvil has been threatening to produce this kind of innings. Since IPL 2025, when he joined CSK as a mid-season replacement, Urvil has cracked 28 boundaries in 79 balls - a boundary every three balls on average. His IPL strike rate of 225.31 is the highest among 91 batters who have faced at least 75 balls since 2025. Higher than the 15-year-old phenom Vaibhav Sooryavanshi (224.67) and the No.1-ranked T20I batter Abhishek Sharma (201.76).
Urvil's no-holds barred assault against LSG had Chepauk giving him the star treatment usually reserved for MS Dhoni and now for Samson. The DJ chose rousing numbers of Vijay, one of Tamil Nadu's biggest movie stars who had officially taken charge as the state's Chief Minister earlier in the day. Around 33,000 fans went wild, chanting "Uuuur-vil! Uuuur-vil! Uuuur-vil! Uuuuur-vil!" and throwing confetti up in the stands.
CSK's campaign had suffered a body blow when Ayush Mhatre was ruled out of the season, but Urvil has slotted into the batting line-up and kept them in the race for the playoffs. His next challenge will be to play another impactful innings in the reverse fixture in Lucknow on Friday.