Tilak Varma: A Suresh Raina fan goes from the Hyderabad bylanes into MI’s IPL roster

The 19-year-old’s life-changing ₹1.7 crore bid in the IPL auction involved meticulous planning by Mumbai Indians talent scouts who had tracked his career path for many years.

At the 2016-17 BCCI awards function, the spotlight was on Virat Kohli and Harmanpreet Kaur. Kohli was ruling the world with his batting—he had nine double-figure scores with six of them double hundreds between July, 2016 and December, 2017—while Kaur had come off a match-winning 171* in the ODI World Cup semi-finals.

File photo of Tilak Varma.(Instagram)

In that company, Tilak Varma, picking up an award for the highest run-scorer in the U16 Vijay Merchant Trophy, was understandably lost. But it marked the beginning of something special. The teenager from old Hyderabad, whose father was an electrician who barely had enough money to afford a decent bat, was soon to make his Ranji debut at just 16, and a few years later get picked for India’s 2020 U19 World Cup campaign.

Varma did not have a good tournament at the World Cup—it’s the kind of thing that stalls careers even before it has had a chance to take off. But unknown to Varma, arguably India’s finest scouting system had been tracking him since even before the U19 World Cup.

They were watching when the young left-handed bat failed to perform at the 2020 Mushtaq Ali Trophy, but former national chief selector Kiran More, former India pacer Vinay Kumar and the others who make up the Mumbai Indians scouting team knew that they had seen someone with a rare spark.

When the 2021 Mushtaq Ali tournament came around, Varma had worked hard to iron out kinks and expand his game with his childhood coach Salam Bayash, particularly focusing on his power-hitting game. It paid off—Varma hit 215 runs in seven matches at a strike rate of nearly 150.

Soon, he was being called up for trials by the MI scouting team, the people responsible for unearthing players like Jasprit Bumrah (who was spotted by former India coach John Wright, who ran MI’s scouting programme for long) and the Pandya brothers

“They saw my power-hitting in the powerplay, the pace of my game in the middle-overs, the range of shots I could hit in the death overs. Their trials were the best I have attended,” Varma said.

Though MI’s scouting system stays hush-hush about its methods (they refused to speak for this story), Varma was tested on various parameters and simulated match situations to assess his control over his game, including chasing down targets, measuring the distance of his sixes, and testing him with quickly changing scenarios.

“He was given targets for different match situations like 30 runs in 12 balls, 40 runs in 20 balls,” said Bayash. “All the boys who were shortlisted for the trials played against each other. Most of them were first-class cricketers. Tilak got a 50 in one of the matches. In another instance, he got 20 runs in 6 balls. They also made him bowl, watched his fielding.”

At the 2022 auction, Varma, watching on TV in his hotel room, could barely believe the bidding contest over him. MI, Chennai Super Kings, Sunrisers Hyderabad and Rajasthan Royals all placed bids on the 19-year-old.

“My Ranji seniors were in my hotel room with me. I was very nervous,” Varma said. “The first bids came from SRH and RR and when MI finally entered at ₹65 lakh, it felt so good.” MI was always where Varma wanted to go, and he got his wish when the others conceded to MI’s ₹1.7 crore bid.

“Rohit (Sharma) bhai and Sachin (Tendulkar) sir have been my favourites since childhood,” said Varma.

The IPL had thus uplifted the life of yet another cricketer with humble beginnings, offering him his first life-changing paycheck.

“The first two-three years of my playing days were very difficult,” Varma said. “We were poor. I would see my father work so hard, day and night without complaining. He would still support me every way possible. I would use only one bat, thread it and use fibre tapes and somehow manage. A new bat would cost ₹8,000-10,000, which was quite expensive for us.”

That MI would go big for Varma was a decision made carefully by their scouting team and coaching staff—there is an internal video where head coach Mahela Jayawardena can be heard raving about Varma’s batting abilities. All-round T20 skills come naturally to the Suresh Raina fan.

“From childhood, I used to watch Suresh bhaiya whether it was his batting, bowling or fielding,” Varma said. “I used to copy everything about him. That’s why I became a left-handed batter.” Varma is otherwise right-handed, and bowls off-spin.

Bayash recalls how Varma would pester him about meeting Raina, so Bayash called a friend who was also a coach and arranged for Varma to meet his hero.

“It was the early days of IPL and was the eve of a Deccan Chargers-CSK match,” Bayash said. “When he finally got to meet him, he kept looking at Raina. He was so happy that he forgot to take a photo with him.”