Aiming for the off-side stars: Inside Ishan Kishan's India comeback

Most data-soaked discourse around bowling to Ishan Kishan will tell you that targeting the channel outside the off-stump is how you tie him down. For a batter wired to explode, those deliveries away from his hitting arc on the off-side are like ticking time bombs, often causing damage and rarely the kind he intends. But in times when flaws are magnified on a screen, passed around and dissected frame by frame in meeting rooms, Kishan remains refreshingly self-aware.

Until the recent New Zealand series he hadn't played a T20I since November 2023, but most of his time in the nets were spent sharpening the one blunt side of his T20 game. "He said I have to improve my off-side hitting ability. I mean, along the ground, he was absolutely alright. But he spoke about hitting sixes on the off-side," Virat Singh, Kishan's Jharkhand teammate, tells Cricbuzz.

Foulkes stuck to the wide lines, but without the expected outcome. Kishan reached out and cleared the infield over cover. When Jacob Duffy tried the same ploy, the result was no different. The sixes did not come immediately, but the aerial access on the off-side had returned. In Thiruvananthapuram, he sent Lockie Ferguson's leg-cutters outside the off-stump to the stands over extra cover in a scintillating century.

These individual moments became crucial plot points in the bigger picture of Kishan's India comeback, the road leading to it involving significant course-correction. "When he was back home, he told me [about his off-season]. I spoke to a lot of bowlers who were bowling in the nets to him. They said that he was trying really hard to improve his off-side game. Since childhood, he has been very dominant through the leg-side. He was very specific that I have to improve my off-side game as well," Virat offers.

Evidently, Kishan's urge to improve one grey area of his game is not a recent epiphany. His batting conversations with Virat have involved such honest introspection for a long time now, stretching far back beyond the recent off-season. He also took his worries to Rajiv Kumar, his coach through age-group cricket (Under-16 and Under-19) and at the Ranji level before. In January 2025, when Rajiv returned to his home town Patna and was over at Kishan's house for dinner, the southpaw brought up an issue that was plaguing his batting - he was unable to score freely on the off-side.

Rajiv asked him to bring his bat and gloves and show his grip, so that he could see if there was anything technical to diagnose. He noticed that Kishan wasn't holding his bat the way he used to when he last coached him - in 2019 for Jharkhand. The grip had changed. Rajiv suggested that Kishan go back to his natural grip, with which he had a more free-flowing bat swing.

"Naturally, he had a very good grip, and his balance was very good. If you see his older videos, you can see how clean his ball striking was," Rajiv tells Cricbuzz. "Somewhere in between he tried a few things, changed his grip and locked himself completely - in a way where he missed out on playing anything on the off-side. Now he is doing exactly what he was doing earlier.

"Those small things (like bat grip) change when you go to different places. Those little changes keep coming up every now and then, and over time become much bigger. Suddenly you will realise that you're missing out on those areas where you used to hit. Realising that and changing his grip to where it was before, he's now completely in his zone - where he can access all sides.

Kishan went into IPL 2025 with those ideas and implemented them in his first game for Sunrisers Hyderabad. He was a generous contributor to Jofra Archer's figures of 0/76 - the worst in IPL history, enroute to a century. The volume of runs he smashed told only one part of the story. It didn't capture the hours of unseen work quite like the thumping six over extra cover he carved against the England pacer. It may not have been a very productive season for him - or the team - in the games that followed, but their playing philosophy was convenient to buy into. It helped that the Indian team was also evolving towards a phase where they were constantly targeting an all-attack style of play.

Rajiv believes the biggest change in Kishan's career came with him getting picked by Sunrisers Hyderabad. "Ishan is a hyperactive kid, and he likes those hyperactive situations where he can thrive. Going to SRH suited his style of batting," Rajiv offers. "The best way for him to deliver is when he can channelise his energy in the right way. You have to be in those hyperactive roles where you are just reacting. If you're reacting better, you will have extra time. But if you start slowing down your hyperactivity, you will end up making the wrong decision. Going to SRH unlocked his thought that what he was thinking all along was correct. That's what he did with the Jharkhand team as well this year."

Before India chose to change tracks and combinations that would lead them to him for the back-up keeper's role, Kishan went into the domestic season with an ambition-fuelled focus. "We sat in meetings with the secretary and the joint secretary [of the state association] just before the season. He was always thinking of winning one championship at least this year," Virat says. "Because winning championships makes a player get into the [Indian] team. That's what his plan was. When the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy (SMAT) started, he made it very clear to all the players in the team that we are going to look to win this tournament."

"He also made it very clear that we are going to select a team which is going to buy into that intensity of winning us the championship. So from day one, he said that it's very important for players like me and a lot of others. If we are going to keep on playing only till the league phase, nobody's going to go up. Because that's what has been happening over the last few years. We were not qualifying and the players were not getting into the IPL or the India A setup. So he made it very clear that till the time we don't win any championships, no player is going to go up."

Rajiv was not surprised by the community intentions that Kishan approached the tournament with. It's something he's seen in him for years now. "You will see some players who are very focussed on themselves, who will do everything right for themselves. But some will look around and try to help everyone around them. I've seen that in him since he was a kid (in his teens) and over the years he has grown more and more to help others," Rajiv says.

His IPL season beyond that opening game hundred remained topsy-turvy but he carried SRH's batting copybook into the Jharkhand dressing room and read it out loud and clear for them to adapt it. "He said the same things which I saw Daniel Vettori and Pat Cummins say in the press conferences last year during the IPL. He told us that no matter what happens - whether we are 10/0 or 10/3, we are going to go out there and just hit. He made that very clear early," Virat says.

Kishan has a tattoo on his chest which reads 'trust your struggle'. Many around him believe a struggling phase is when he tends to bring out the best version of himself. It's something that Rajiv has also reminded him of. "Once you have a difficult situation, you will always come out on top." Losing his India spot and central contract pushed him towards self-improvement, and the SMAT season put him right back on top.

On December 18 2025, he capped off a sensational season of SMAT with a 49-ball 101 in the final against Haryana in Pune. His season tally - 517 runs at a strike rate of 197.33 - screamed of the intent that India have embraced and improved over two World Cup cycles since 2022. Expectedly then, the two worlds collided and Kishan was back in the India squad after more than a year-and-a-half.

Over a month on, he's India's first-choice opener in a home World Cup and the sixes are coming all around the ground. That said, analysts will continue to advice bowlers to keep hammering it down in that supposedly uncomfortable channel and see if it still holds up - much like USA's Shadley van Schalkwyk did in Mumbai when he got him out. Kishan has since spent two evenings under lights in Delhi trying to tonk balls fired into that dreaded space.

Yet, Namibia are likely to follow the same blueprint, as will Pakistan, Netherlands and every other team he faces in the rest of the World Cup. But against this upgraded version of Kishan, all of it may now come more in hope than conviction.

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