At 37, in his first full Tamil Nadu Premier League (TNPL) season, R Ashwin is expanding his range as a batsman. He has always been good at finding boundaries from the ground, a skill that Rajasthan Royals exploited when they sent him up the order to give their finishers a more suitable entry point in the IPL, but in this year’s TNPL, Ashwin has been working on playing boundary shots from the goal square, and it’s paying off.

In the Qualifier 2 against Idream Tiruppur Tamizhans at Chepauk on Friday, Ashwin bowled left-arm finger spinners R Sai Kishore and S Ajith Ram with a series of reverse sweeps. He was particularly tough on Sai Kishore, scoring 28 off nine balls at a strike rate of over 300. In total, Ashwin scored 200 off eight innings at a strike rate of 166.66 in this TNPL, with five of those innings coming at the top or at No. 3 for Dindigul Dragons.

“Look, everything is a work in progress, isn’t it?” he said on the eve of the TNPL final against Shahrukh Khan’s Lyca Kovai Kings in Chennai. “You can even ask Shahrukh Khan that. How he plays the powerful shots… how you hit the ball offside and to the leg side. It’s all about repetitions and understanding the angles and triggers.

“Obviously, in the last IPL, I felt I needed to expand my game and broaden my horizons inside the wicket because I knew I could hit the ball into the ground and use my feet. It was something I had to ask myself if I wanted to explore other options. So, if I can ask that question and find an answer, it gives me a new avenue to explore and continue my interest in the game.”

Dindigul’s rookie left-arm finger spinner P Vignesh had missed out on qualifying for the Under-19 World Cup for India earlier this year but has been particularly impressive with his accuracy and control in this TNPL. He came away with figures of 3 for 8 and the Player of the Match award in the 2nd Qualifier against Tiruppur. Like Vignesh, Tiruppur’s offspin-bowling allrounder Mohamed Ali was also dropped from India’s Under-19 World Cup squad but made his mark in the TNPL. Ashwin urged the next generation of cricketers to embrace failures and continue to improve their skills.

“Look, first of all I think missing the Under-19 cut is not the end of the world. When I think about how fragile our future generation can be, I really encourage people to look at this game as a part of life,” Ashwin said. “Failure and success are very, very normal and people only get better through failures. So knowing P Vignesh, the Indian team coming into their nets and I think they are improving every day and this kind of tournament gives these guys an opportunity to express and expand their game. I really hope they are ready to expand continuously and find answers to the questions that are going to be asked.”

Shahrukh: GT helped me improve my game against spin

Shahrukh has often struggled with spin, especially at the start of his innings, but is working on a technical change – a trigger move where he pushes his weight forward – and believes it will help him become a more versatile batsman.

“When I was with Gujarat Titans, we had a camp there for about a couple of months, so I started working a lot on my spin game because they were asking me to move up the order,” Shahrukh said. “And when you move up the order, especially for a batsman like me who has concerns against spin bowling, obviously, the opposition teams were bringing spin when I was out to bat. So, their role was to help me improve my spin game and that really helped. The fore-pressing I do (in the TNPL) is now quite prominent and it has helped me score runs off both the front foot and the back foot.”

Shahrukh’s overall strike rate against pace in the IPL was 161.11, while it dropped sharply against spin to 112. However, in IPL 2024, he managed to increase his strike rate against spin to 168.75 while maintaining a similarly high strike rate against pace. And when Kovai faced Dindigul in the league stage in Tirunelveli, Shahrukh faced mystery spinner Varun Chakravarthy and left-arm spinner Vignesh on his way to an unbeaten 51 in 25 balls.

Shahrukh, who lost the match against Dindigul, urged his team to bring out their “best cricket” to achieve the treble target in the TNPL.

“I don’t really know (about the law of averages). We are taking it as just another game,” Shahrukh said. “The law of averages and the treble (title)… all that stuff is there on social media, but we are not focusing on that. Out of the eight games we have played, we have lived up to our expectations as a unit in only two. Hopefully, we will try to bring that even in this game. I think we have still not played our best cricket this year and we will try to do that.”