Nitish Kumar Reddy: The Page Behind Irfan Pathan’s Praise Is Still Blank

The Christchurch match ended, and before the studio lights had warmed up, Irfan Pathan’s line was already out: Nitish Kumar Reddy is “growing in confidence as an all-rounder.” I went looking for the scorecard. What the report gave me was one word — thriller. No total, no over where the game turned, no phase in which Reddy bowled. Thirty-five years in this trade have hardened one reflex in me: after any praise, first find the column where the over-by-over arithmetic is written down. Here the column was blank. The scorebook remembers what the highlight reel forgets, and at this hour the scorebook has nothing to say.

Let me restate the available record honestly. A T20 international was played in Christchurch, New Zealand, and was described as a close contest. Immediately after it, the former India all-rounder Irfan Pathan backed Reddy strongly and said the young man is growing in confidence as an all-rounder. The report names no opponent, no date, no pitch report, no toss, no dew. One can infer this was part of India’s tour of New Zealand and that the venue was Hagley Oval, where the ball carries and seams. An inference is not evidence; I will label it context and leave it there.

T20 cricket runs in three phases — the powerplay (overs 1-6), the middle (7-15) and the death (16-20). An all-rounder’s true value is decided by where he sits in those three blocks. A man who bowls the 12th to 15th over and bats at seven is a convenience: useful, not structural. A man who bowls the 18th to 20th and bats at five changes the shape of the XI, because the team no longer has to field an extra specialist bowler to cover him. In cricket’s own vocabulary, “growing in confidence” means exactly one thing: the role is expanding. An expanding role shows up phase by phase in the scorecard. It does not show up in a quote.

Pathan’s words should not be waved away, and I say that on the strength of his own ledger. He played 29 Tests, 120 ODIs and 24 T20 internationals, and took 100 Test wickets and 173 in ODIs. A man who spent a career holding the new ball and batting in the lower order uses the word confidence technically, not sentimentally — wrist position, the length of the yorker at the death, the bat’s angle against the short ball. It means he saw something. Seeing and measuring, though, are two different jobs, and the most common failure in this trade is to merge them.

A former player’s endorsement is a signal, not a measurement. It acquires value only when it is graded against the phase data of the next three matches — and the grading scale has to be written down, with a date, before those matches are played.

So I am filing the entry today, dated, so it cannot be quietly revised later: if Reddy bowls in the death overs across his next three T20 innings and keeps an economy under 8.5, Pathan’s read will have held. If his spell shrinks back to the 12th-to-15th-over block and his batting slot settles at six or seven, the praise was premature — well-intentioned, but premature. I followed the paper trail before I trusted the roar.

From the outside the story looks tidy: one thriller, one young player, one famous former cricketer’s seal, and the piece writes itself. The market is calling him a rising star. What I see is a blank page with one sentence written on it in good ink. Tours like Christchurch do two things to young players at once — they test them, and they inflate the price of a single innings. A thriller does not mean Reddy was at the centre of it. He may have been hit for a six in the 19th over and the side may have won anyway. Praise is a headline until the paperwork speaks.

Two risks sit plainly on the table. The sample is one match and the proof is one sentence; hanging a selection decision on that is the mistake we repeat every season. The other is workload, the permanent tax on a fast-bowling all-rounder. During Tamil Nadu’s Ranji campaign in 2026 I built a spreadsheet that showed a 21-year-old seamer had sent down 120 overs in 21 days — a workload that pointed at a stress fracture. The team rested him and the injury never arrived. That arithmetic has to be redone on every tour for a player with a double role, and it matters more with Reddy because his value is built from both jobs at once. One injury takes away two.

In cricket’s punditry economy, praise is cheap currency. The expensive currency is the selection sheet, where the date, the format and the phase-specific responsibility are actually written. Pathan’s comment may move Reddy’s brand value, and a sustained run would push his name up an IPL auction list — but auction sheets are built from scorebooks, not from studio praise. Franchises buy retention arithmetic and death-over planning, not sentiment.

Three concrete things will settle this for me: the over from which his next spell begins, the batting position he holds in the next series, and the category his name occupies on the BCCI’s next squad sheet. None of those answers will come out of a television debate.

That Christchurch night remains a good story. It simply has no numbers in it yet, and without numbers it is a sentence, not proof. The next time Reddy takes the ball, I will not be watching who says what about him. I will be watching which over the captain hands him. The captain’s hand is the most honest scorecard in the game.