It’s very common for the young, emerging wicket-keepers batsmen from India to have MS Dhoni as their role-model and KL Rahul is no different either as he has hailed the former Indian captain on quite a few occasions in the past.
Yesterday, KL Rahul had a great day on the field against Mumbai Indians, not just with the bat, but with the gloves as well. The KXIP skipper was as usual the highest run-scorer for his team with the bat, but he couldn’t quite get his team over the line with his fifty and it was a tie.
But, Rahul then kept his calm and showed amazing composure as a wicket-keeper on the last ball of the first super over where he ran Quinton de Kock out to make sure the first super over got tied and the match went into the second super over which Punjab won and secured two points.
A lot of KXIP fans were really impressed with Rahul’s glovework during the super over. A fan on twitter tagged him earlier today and called him “thala” to which Rahul replied and said that there’s only one thala and everyone knows who he is.
Rahul was probably hinting towards MS Dhoni who is very fondly called thala by the CSK fans and since Rahul is now supposedly Dhoni’s successor in India’s ODI team, one of KXIP fans called him thala as well.
Rahul had made his debut for India as a specialist batsman as Dhoni was keeping wickets at that stage, but now with Dhoni being retired, Rahul is India’s first choice as a wicket-keeper in white ball cricket.
Rahul has operated as a wicket-keeper batsman in only a couple of series for India till date, but has excelled in both those series and he is likely to continue keeping wickets for India on the tour of Australia as well which will start towards the end of November.
In the ongoing IPL, Rahul has discharged the wicket-keeping duties in most of the games barring a couple of games mid-way through the tournament where he felt he needed a break and he gave the gloves to Nicholas Pooran and Prabhsimran Singh.
