He is so big on volume in the nets that his team-mates and coaches at Gujarat Titans and Tamil Nadu have often had to intervene to cut short his training sessions. During the IPL 2026 playoffs, Vikram Solanki, Gujarat Titans’ director of cricket, suggested that Sai Sudharsan was someone they have had to “hold back” and give him “find time to rest”.
“First of all, it [rehab] is not frustrating at all,” Sai Sudharsan said during the first four-dayer. “It’s just the journey we are going through. And our body also responds to certain things. It’s about that. We are also refining our habits every day. So, it’s a good thing.
“It’s a great opportunity to come back and play. When I played on the first day, that’s when I felt how badly I missed that feeling of playing inside. So, it was a great opportunity and a good outing as well.”
“I feel as professionals, or even with a little bit of experience of what we have played in England or in Australia, it helps us to simulate a certain way and understand what is important, what we have to work on, or what we have to touch base before getting into New Zealand”
B Sai Sudharsan
“It’s more of learning how to score runs,” Sai Sudharsan said. “The ground does not have a flying outfield. So you got to run a lot. From my mindset, the boundaries were always the other side of the ground. So you had to plan a certain way to score a lot of boundaries this side. And not force so much because that side is anyway very slow.
“On wickets like these, it’s important to put the bowlers on the back foot and keep pressing them. So the options were clear. Maybe the execution could have been better from my side. Both the offspinners bowled very well. The wicket assisted quite a lot. It was about how we use our feet and how we read the length as early as possible and choose the right options.”
Sai Sudharsan’s second innings was cut short when he chose the wrong shot – a sweep from the stumps – against a Murphy slider from around the wicket that was too full. It followed a trend of bright starts and bizarre endings for Sai Sudharsan in red-ball cricket.
He has a chance to buck that trend and test out his toe once again in the Puducherry heat in the second four-dayer before he potentially travels to New Zealand for a three-match unofficial Test series.
“I feel as professionals, or even with a little bit of experience of what we have played in England or in Australia, it helps us to simulate a certain way and understand what is important, what we have to work on, or what we have to touch base before getting into New Zealand,” Sai Sudharsan said. “And after that series, there is definitely a good amount of time to prepare for the Border-Gavaskar Trophy.”
For now, though, Sai Sudharsan is back to his happy place: scoring runs in the middle and netting up voraciously for the next challenge.
Deivarayan Muthu is a senior sub-editor at Cricinfo