Guwahati: Navigating through a barrage of online trolling isn’t a walk in the park, especially when you’re just stepping into your teenage years. Riyan Parag‘s cricketing path, in this regard, hasn’t been a smooth ride.
After scoring only 600 runs from 54 matches across previous seasons that invited merciless criticism, heavy-duty trolling and meme-fest on social media, Riyan 2.0 has burst onto the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2024, with renewed vigour that has so far yielded 284 runs. He is only second to Virat Kohli in the run aggregator’s list.
There are no over-the-top celebrations, his only statements have come through his willow and finally he understood how to deal with life beyond the 22 yards.
“Life on the outside of cricket affects you, and that’s one big major part which has played in my career is how I deal with it,” Riyan said ahead of Rajasthan Royals’s IPL game against the Kolkata Knight Riders in West Bengal’s capital city of Kolkata on Tuesday (April 16).
He has never had an average of more than 17 in his previous seasons and his best-ever return with the bat was in his maiden year, when he aggregated 160 from seven outings at an average of 32.00.
“It didn’t start well, I took a lot of things to heart that were being said about me, whatever it was. I just had to figure out what mattered to me, whose opinions mattered to me, and I figured that out eventually, and that has helped,” Riyan added, who during last year’s Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy T20 tournament after scoring a half-century against Bengal, had made a celebratory gesture that he is cut above everyone.
Riyan faced a lot of criticism, at times rightly so, for his on-field antics. More so, because performances were not coming through. But under Zubin Bharucha’s guidance at the Royals Academy in Talegaon, things changed as he worked hard on his game, fitness and results showed in every domestic tournament he played this year.
Riyan’s name is doing rounds as a possible contender in the Indian senior national team for the T20 World Cup in the US and West Indies, but realistically, it is the tour of Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe, where he has more realistic chances of cutting.
“I am not thinking about the World Cup to be very honest. If you told me last year I would be in this position, I would not have believed you. So I am just really glad to be doing what I am doing and I just want to continue that. I want to take it one game at a time and focus on how I can win more matches for the team, because that is more important,” he said.
Before this IPL, Riyan averaged 13.00 in 2022, aggregating just 78 runs from seven matches, but being promoted to number 4 by Kumar Sangakkara has changed the course of his career.
“Cricketing-wise, I think playing at number 4 is again something which I am used to doing in domestic cricket in different situations, more common situations. But yeah, it has been a mix of both, emotionally and skill-wise,” he added.
The swashbuckling batter from Assam’s Guwahati, Riyan, feels that he has been contributing a lot to the team and that is what he has been trying to do for the past few years, though it hasn’t clicked. He said that this time it clicked and he just wanted to continue with it.