WORTH HIS SALT: POWER PLAYER ON TOP OF HIS GAME

Opener's remarkable ability to find boundaries at will a big advantage for RCB

- SWAROOP SWAMINATHAN @ Chennai

PHIL Salt likes to score boundaries. Sure, your counter could probably be all cricketers like hitting boundaries. Even among this cohort, the opener is an outlier. Right from when he comes out to open, either setting a target or chasing one, he likes to hit boundaries. Most of the time, it's fraught with risk. He exposes his stumps to go over the in-field or swipes across the line to target the usually vacant spaces on the on-side during the powerplay.

It doesn't matter who's bowling to him: left-arm wrist spin, left-arm pace, right-arm leg-break, hit-the-deck... across the 2024 edition, some of these bowling types have opened against Salt, the one who usually takes strike. He tries to take down all of them from ball one. That's why it wasn't a surprise that he danced down to Vaibhav Arora to thrash him through covers off the first ball for his new franchise last week. He had done it a fair few times for the defending champions in 2024.

It's why he takes strike. It's all about sending a message, setting the tempo and trying to get ahead of the game as soon as possible.