KL Rahul and the art of forgetting how to enjoy yourself

Then something went wrong. Not overnight. These things never happen overnight. By 2020 the shoulders had tightened. Same bloke who treated the Powerplay like his personal property started treating it like a crime scene. The stride got careful. The bat came down like a shield, not a whip.

He was still scoring. That’s the cruel bit. Five seasons running he crossed 500 runs(Almost 600 actually). The numbers looked after him. The averages stayed fat and healthy.

But somewhere between Punjab and Lucknow, between all those press conferences where he kept explaining why “strike rate is over-rated,” Rahul lost the plot.

Or found a different one. Where his wicket was too precious to risk. Where taking the game deep mattered more than winning it. Where fear of failure became the same thing as fear of letting go.

This isn’t about technique. The cover drive still flowed when he let it. The pull shot was still there in his muscles, like an old mate he stopped calling. This is about what happens when a young bloke decides he’s the only adult in the room.

The Trap of Being Sensible

Rahul’s problem was never that he couldn’t hit boundaries. Watch the 2016 RCB stuff or his initial T20I years for India. He’s a different animal. Walking down the pitch to quicks, hitting sixes off the back foot, treating spinners like they’ve personally offended him. That version struck at 146. He was 24 and had nothing to protect.

By 2020 he was protecting everything. Punjab’s middle order looked thin, so he became the glue. Problem with glue is it holds things together but never moves. Cricviz had his attacking rating in the Powerplay at 126 in 2021. Down from 150.

He was leaving balls he’d have hit for six two years before. Taking singles when the field was up. Playing the percentages, except the percentages had changed and nobody told him.

2021 made it official. Strike rate fell to 138. Average climbed to 62. Cricket split into two camps. One saw a responsible anchor doing his job. The other saw a man drowning in his own caution, dragging everyone down with him. Both were right. That’s what made it hard to watch.

At Lucknow it got worse. They built the franchise around him. Made him captain. Gave him the keys. Rahul responded by building higher walls. 2023, his strike rate crashed to 113. Still getting runs, 274 of them in 9 games, but facing more dot balls than boundary hitters.

The Impact Player rule arrived that year. Meant teams could effectively bat till number eight. The old excuse about fragile middle orders was dead. Rahul kept using it anyway.

The low point came against Sunrisers in 2024. LSG managed 166 runs, he made 29 off 33 balls. Looked like he was batting on a different planet from Travis Head and Abhishek Sharma, who chased the same total down in 9.4 overs. One team playing 2024 cricket. The other playing 2004 cricket and wondering why the results weren’t the same.

Numbers Don’t Lie Anymore

Here’s the thing about T20 in the Impact Player age. The numbers stopped pretending.

2023: thirty-seven scores over 200. 2024: forty-one. 2025: fifty-two. More than a third of all innings crossing that mark. Average run rate climbed from 8.64 to 9.62. Powerplay run rate crossed 10 for the first time ever in 2024. These aren’t cosmetic changes. They’re structural.

Rahul’s response to this new world? Dig in deeper. Kept saying strike rate was over-rated. Kept pointing to situations where caution made sense. Not wrong in theory. If you’re chasing 140, you don’t need 200.

But theory assumes you know what you’re chasing before you start. In modern T20, you don’t. Par scores move. The pitch that looks slow in the third over looks like a highway by the twelfth. The bowler who looks dangerous with the new ball becomes cannon fodder at the death.

Rahul was preparing for collapses that the Impact Player rule made obsolete. Teams didn’t need anchors because they had batting insurance. You could take risks in the Powerplay because if you lost three wickets, you subbed in another batter.

Old logic of preservation became new logic of waste. Every dot ball Rahul faced in the first six overs wasn’t a building block. It was a surrender.

2024 exposed this fully. Rahul made 520 runs at 136 strike rate. Virat Kohli, playing similar role for RCB, made his at 155. Difference wasn’t talent. It was permission. Kohli gave himself permission to fail. Rahul didn’t.

The release

Lucknow let him go. That’s cricket. You don’t fire your captain in the papers. You just don’t buy him back. Rahul went into the 2025 mega auction with questions hanging over him like wet washing. Was he finished? Could he adapt? Had the game moved too fast for a bloke who built his reputation on refusing to move?

Delhi Capitals paid 14 crore. That’s not backup money. That’s faith money. Or gamble money. Either way, Rahul arrived at a franchise where he wasn’t captain, wasn’t the face, wasn’t the man who had to explain everything to everyone. He could just bat.

Something opened up. You could see it in the first few games. Shoulders dropped again. Bat started coming down like a whip, not a shield. Taking on spinners in the middle overs, which he’d stopped doing years ago. Hitting sixes off balls he’d have pushed for singles in 2023.

The numbers followed. 539 runs at 149 strike rate. Still not the 160-plus of true impact players like Suryakumar or Pooran, but a different man from the 113-strike-rate version of 2023. More importantly, he started admitting things.

Said he’d “lost the fun of hitting boundaries.” Said he’d become trapped in an approach focused on taking games deep. Said he was rediscovering why he started playing in the first place.

Sounds like redemption. It isn’t. It’s survival. T20 doesn’t care about your feelings. It cares about your scoring rate. Rahul wasn’t becoming a better person. He was becoming more useful. The distinction matters because it explains why the change stuck.

He wasn’t doing this for peace of mind. He was doing it because the alternative was irrelevance.

What the numbers actually say

2025 put Rahul in interesting company. Sai Sudharsan made 759 runs at 156 for Gujarat. Suryakumar made 717 at 168 for Mumbai. Kohli found 657 at 145 for Bangalore. Rahul’s 539 at 149 placed him in the tier below absolute elite, but within shouting distance.

Difference was approach, not output. Rahul was no longer calculating risk. He was accepting it. Against Chennai at Chepauk, a pitch where scoring fast traditionally meant trouble, he took down Jadeja and Ashwin with shots he wouldn’t have attempted in 2022.

The 77 he made there wasn’t his highest of the season, but it was the most telling. Proved he could bat this way on difficult tracks against quality spin. The technical ability never left. The mindset did.

The Human bit

Here’s what stats sheets never capture. The weight of being the responsible one. Rahul spent six years telling himself his team needed him to stay in. That if he got out early, the innings would collapse. That his wicket was worth more than quick runs. It’s inverted humility. A belief that you’re the only one who can fix things.

Problem is T20 doesn’t work this way. It’s a team sport played at individual speed. When Rahul batted slowly in the Powerplay, he wasn’t protecting his team. He was forcing them into impossible positions later.

Punjab and Lucknow’s middle orders struggled partly because they always entered with required rates climbing toward 12 or 13. They had to take risks Rahul wouldn’t take. They failed more often because the task was harder.

This is the cruelty of the anchor role as Rahul practiced it. Looks like selflessness. Functions as selfishness. You stay in, make your runs, keep your average healthy, leave the dirty work to everyone else.

When they fail, it confirms you were right to be careful. When they succeed, you share the credit. Rigged game. Rahul played it for six years without realising the house always wins.

Delhi broke the cycle by removing the captaincy, removing the pressure of being the face, surrounding him with players who could do the heavy lifting.

Suddenly Rahul didn’t need to be the adult. He could just be a batter. The freedom showed in his wrists, his feet, the way he started reading bowlers again instead of just surviving them.

What’s in store for 2026?

Then came 2026. The Ahmedabad game against Gujarat. Chasing 211, Rahul walked out and immediately the old questions returned. Twenty off seventeen balls. The careful start. The looking-in period.

The same bloke who had spent all of 2025 trying to break free was suddenly back to his old habits, taking his time, sizing things up, waiting for the perfect moment that might never come.

Everyone who has watched Rahul for years saw it. The ability to hit any ball for four or six has never been missing. It’s the wiring inside his head that’s always been the problem. When to switch it on. How long to wait. Whether today is the day to take risks or the day to survive.

Against Gujarat, he eventually found the switch. Twenty-nine balls for his fifty. Four, six, six, four against Prasidh Krishna in that brutal over. Ninety-two off fifty-two at the end, highest score of the season so far, and Delhi still lost by one run.

Rahul wanted to bat deep. Wanted to take it to the last over. Wanted to be there at the finish.

That is the remaining ghost. Even in his most aggressive innings of 2026, the old instinct for preservation lurked underneath.

He started with two low scored in his first two games this season. Then this near-masterpiece that still wasn’t quite enough. The talent is undeniable. The technique is intact. But the wiring in his head still defaults to safety when the pressure cranks up.

The real lesson

There’s a tendency to turn these stories into morality plays. Rahul learned his lesson. Became humble. Accepted the modern game. Too neat. Too easy.

Truth is Rahul didn’t change because he wanted to. He changed because he had to. The IPL is a market like any other. When your product stops selling, you improve it or you disappear.

2025 auction was his last chance at top-tier pricing. 2026 season will determine whether he stays there. Cricket at this level is always commerce. The emotions we attach are real, but they’re secondary. What matters is whether you can do the job today, not whether you meant well yesterday.

Rahul can do the job again. That’s what 539 runs at 149 proves. Not that he’s become a better person. Not that he’s seen the light.

Simply that he’s found a way to be useful in a game that moved on without him. For six years he stood still, believing standing still was a virtue. The game taught him otherwise. The game is a harsh teacher, but it’s usually right.

The last word

Sometime in 2025, Rahul gave an interview where he talked about rediscovering the “fun” of hitting sixes. The word stuck out. Fun. Like it was something he’d misplaced, like old photos, and stumbled upon again while cleaning out a drawer.

Truth is more complicated. Fun isn’t something you lose and find. It’s something you permit yourself to have.

Rahul stopped permitting it in 2019. Started again in 2025. The years between weren’t wasted, exactly. He learned things. Grew as a captain, even if that growth came at the cost of his batting.

Understood pressure in ways few cricketers ever do. But he also built a cage, and stayed in it long after the door opened.

2026 will tell us if he’s truly broken free, or if this is just temporary parole. T20 has no memory and no loyalty. Yesterday’s redemption is tomorrow’s failure. Rahul knows this now. Probably knew it all along. Knowing and accepting are different things. He’s crossed that gap. The rest is just cricket.