Jitesh Sharma will hope his latest India odyssey is more productive. ©BCCI
On a warm April night in 2023, as RCB and PBKS players drifted into post-match huddles along the boundary in Mohali, a promising relationship was initiated. Tamil Nadu batter Shahrukh Khan approached Dinesh Karthik, and beside him walked Jitesh Sharma, just short of turning 30, with questions to ask. It came right after Jitesh had hit 41 off 27, a knock that nearly won his team the match. Karthik spoke to him briefly about their shared vocation of finishing games, and that was that.
A year later, in May 2024, Jitesh caught up with Karthik again over lunch in Dharamsala. By this time, a lot had transpired in Jitesh's career. A strong finish to the previous season of IPL had opened doors he hadn't quite expected to walk through: a spot in the Indian side at the Asian Games in October 2023. In the months that followed, six more T20I appearances came with smattering of promise but also struggles, an occupational hazard of his role in the batting ecosystem. The weight of an India cap sat heavily on his head, upsetting the rhythms of a game that once thrived on freedom. The result was an IPL 2024 that felt a little off-key.
"I think he was never someone who was desperate to play for India," Dinesh Karthik tells Cricbuzz. "And he was very free and he went about playing very confidently for Kings, and then made it to the Indian team. And then he knew that he was on the fringes when he didn't do as well, and the T20 World Cup 2024 was around the corner. That's when he became desperate. That kind of filtered into his performances which weren't as good as he wanted them to be, and he put himself under immense pressure."
During that lunch meeting, Jitesh dropped his guard in a quest to claw himself out of the burrow he felt he had dug. "I was quite fond of the kid," Karthik says. "Because he was very honest, very earnest and wanted to really improve and do well. But I think it got to a point where he wasn't sure how to move forward from there. I just took note of it and kept it."
When they next met in IPL 2025, equations had changed. Karthik had retired from the tournament and returned to RCB as a coach, with the intention of giving back what Abhishek Nayar had offered him in the late stages of his own career.
