The Sunrisers Hyderabad allrounder talks about fighting early disappointment and doubts to become a breakout star
Shashank Kishore23-Jul-2024Nitish Kumar Reddy’s eyes welled up when he received his first India kit last month. He immediately rang his father in Visakhapatnam to tell him he had been selected in India’s T20I squad to tour Zimbabwe.The 21-year-old was fast-tracked into the national squad on the back of his IPL performance for Sunrisers Hyderabad this year: he scored 303 runs in 11 innings, mostly in the middle order, at a strike rate of 143, and picked up three wickets with his lively seam-ups.But the highs of Reddy’s selection dissipated quickly when a sports hernia ruled him out of the tour. Reddy is now working his way back to full fitness ahead of the new domestic season that kicks off with the Duleep Trophy on September 5.”Fame is a funny thing,” Reddy says during our hour-long meeting in Bengaluru. “After the IPL, the same people who told my father how he was foolish to risk his career for me started praising him for his foresight. I remembered they got emotional when my India kit arrived.”Related
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In 2016, when Reddy was 13, his father, Mutyalu, who worked with Hindustan Zinc Limited in Visakhapatnam, was to be transferred to Jodhpur in Rajasthan. But instead Mutyalu decided to quit to focus his efforts on his son, who had just been picked by the Andhra Cricket Association (ACA) at a district trials.”He quit and invested the corpus he received into a microfinance business in Vizag [Visakhapatnam],” Reddy says. “But unfortunately, when the business didn’t do well, our own extended family, society – everyone started taunting him for his decision. As much as he tried not to let that filter through to me, eventually he couldn’t help it.”I saw how people’s attitude towards him changed from when he had a job to after he quit. They would disrespect him, he’d be ignored.”I couldn’t take it. That spurred my motivation to give it my all, because my father had given up everything for me. Until then, I’d played for fun, but from there on, everything changed.”The 13-year-old left home comforts to move 700km away to join ACA’s residential academy in Kadapa, where he trained twice daily and attended middle school. He learned the basics of fast bowling under local coaches there.”Until I joined the academy, I was only a batter, my bowling was no good – I would throw,” he says with a laugh. “Only after I began regular training, I understood biomechanics, how your action impacts different parts of your body, and I worked on correcting it.”Reddy first made waves in the Under-16 Vijay Merchant Trophy when he scored a triple-hundred against Tamil Nadu, 190 against a strong Karnataka attack, and a quadruple against Nagaland, finishing the 2017-18 tournament with a record 1237 runs.But the record-breaking run turned out to be a false dawn. He admits he got “carried away” by the early success.”I thought I’m naturally good. Everyone spoke highly about my technique, and I was flying. The following year, when I graduated to U-19s and flopped, I initially brushed it aside thinking it was a bad patch. But when I had a second bad season, it gave me a reality check.”Early in 2019, frustrated by his failures, Reddy decided he wanted to go all in as a batter. “I thought giving up bowling will free me up to focus and excel in just one discipline.”But one of his coaches, Srinivas Reddy, managed to dissuade him from giving up on bowling.”One evening, I called the coach and said my batting is going down, from opening, I’m now batting at No. 4, sometimes even lower. Sometimes I’m being only played as a bowler, which I don’t like. I want to fully focus on being an opener.”He sat me down and made me understand how I may have not even got those chances in the second year of U-19s had it not been for my bowling, because I was hardly scoring runs. He drilled into me how fast-bowling allrounders are rare and it would be very silly of me to give it up at this point just because I had one bad season.”
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