For Mayank Agarwal, Tuesday morning was a regular day in the office. It was the final of the Vijay Hazare Trophy, against Saurashtra. Opener Agarwal top scored for Karnataka, with 90 runs off 79 balls. Karnataka, which had set the Cheteshwar Pujara-led side a target of 254 runs, won the match by 41 runs. Agarwal was declared player of the match.
With 2,141 runs, the 27-year-old Bengaluru boy broke the record of most runs in a domestic season across all formats. The previous best was 1,947 runs in 2015-16 season by Shreyas Iyer, for Mumbai. With some more domestic cricket left in the season—the Deodhar Trophy is set to be played in the first week of March—Agarwal might stretch that record even more.
Mayank scored 1,160 runs in Ranji Trophy, averaging 105.45. This included five hundreds, including an unbeaten 304. He followed this up with 3 half-centuries in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy (Twenty 20 domestic tournament). He then went on to score 723 runs in eight matches of the Vijay Hazare tournament (109, 84, 28, 102, 89, 140, 81 and 90).
If this isn't a purple patchy, then what is?
Speaking about his outstanding season, Agarwal said after the final, “Throughout the season I have been doing all the things that I did at the start of it. There is also the belief factor, (there was) lot of support—it is really good for the player to know that he is really supported by the team management. The Karnataka selectors backed me at that time. It felt good. From there on I knew that if I got a start, I had to make it big. The talk in dressing room is always that who ever is doing well has to take the team through.”
Agarwal admitted that his ongoing purple patch was because he was “in the zone” where everything fell in place and felt right for him to put up the big scores regularly. “Yes, definitely. I feel confident, I feeI I am in the zone doing all the right things. When you are in it, try and extend it as long as possible. It's more about watching the ball and middling the ball—that's the thing I have been looking to do.”
An attacking opening batsman, Agarwal believes in the Virender Sehwag school of batting. He had the potential to make it large. He was star of India's disappointing Under-19 World Cup campaign in 2010. He was then fast-tracked to the India A side but the transition to the senior grade wasn't smooth. He made his Ranji Trophy debut thereafter in 2013-14 while his T20 debut, not surprisingly, came earlier in 2010-11. He has, undoubtedly, shed his tag of being just a limited-overs specialist in a big way.
His name was doing the rounds ahead of Team India's trip to Sri Lanka starting March 6. However, despite senior players like Virat Kohli and Mahendra Singh Dhoni being rested, the selectors chose to ignore Agarwal. Refusing to dwell on that disappointment, Agarwal said, “To be really honest, we have to focus on things at hand and playing final today was our focus. I think what a player can do is go out there and score runs. Performing is in his hands, rest is not in our hands. There's no point thinking about it.”