First, let’s start with the positives. Before even playing a match on their home ground of the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur, Rajasthan Royals have five wins, ten points from seven games, and sit in second place in the table. Under Riyan Parag’s rookie leadership, the young and impressive Royals team seem to be on pace for the playoffs, where their power-hitting and well-rounded bowling will make them a threat.
Riyan Parag’s captaincy is a tick in the book – how he has utilised his bowling resources, been unafraid to top-end his overseas stars in Jofra Archer and Nandre Burger, and how well he has planned for some of the most destructive hitters in the league.
But for Parag on a personal level, there is a lot left to be desired. The captaincy hat is one which sits heavy on most heads, and Parag is one of the many in the IPL who have struggled to don it and keep it separate from his own performances on the field.
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Parag failing to step up to the requirements
There have been some tactical missteps – giving himself an over against Rinku Singh and Anukul Roy, when Ravindra Jadeja still had an over to spare, and giving an ailing KKR a path to beat RR, is probably the most significant. But most crucial of all has been Parag’s failure to show up with the bat: 81 runs in 7 matches at the heart of RR’s order, a blank spot that is threatening to render all the good work moot.
Parag is surrounded by Indian talent that has made RR forces to be reckoned with. The untapped potential of Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, the steadily growing leadership of Yashasvi Jaiswal, the dependency of Dhruv Jurel. Following this top three, the Riyan Parag that was expected was a continuation of the player who hammered 950+ runs in the last two IPL seasons, with the bat speed and the gap-finding, to convert those starts into big scores for his team.
What was expected of Parag in that number four position is something akin to what Shreyas Iyer for PBKS and Rajat Patidar for RCB are providing – two players thriving under the captaincy, at the helm of two successful teams gunning for the title with some revolutionary batting in the middle of the order.
What’s the solution for Parag?
But rather than being spurred on by the additional responsibility, Parag finds himself in the camp of players who were rewarded captaincy because of the quality, only to find themselves crushed by the pressure. Rishabh Pant, who continues to find it uneasy, or Ruturaj Gaikwad, who looks like a shadow of his former self since taking over from MS Dhoni.
Captaincy is a skill all of its own in cricket, and at least Parag is finding success there. But at the end of the day, you can’t choose your best captain in T20 cricket anymore, even in an impact player era where teams have additional resources: players like Parag have received the mantle because of how key they are to team spirit and to team performance. To lose their own contribution to that can prove fatal.
What’s going wrong for Parag is not an easy problem to diagnose – he is returning from some injury rehab and that might play a role, and Kumar Sangakkara believes that he is hitting it well and is not too far from producing a match-winning knock soon. Parag believes the same – it’s simply a question of walking the talk.
Is keeping batting separate from captaincy the right advice? It changes from player to player – Iyer, for example, is batting with the maturity of a leader, clearly made stronger by that additional responsibility. Patidar bats like he wants his team to bat, hell-for-leather, one of a long list of power hitters. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer for what will work for Parag, but sooner rather than later, he needs to find what does.