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.

What Salt does, of course, isn’t unique. Throughout the league, and the T20 landscape across the globe, a lot of batters are explicitly told to take on the field restrictions in the powerplay. What makes the 28-year-old unique, though, is his ability to marry aggression with execution.

In each of the last years in all of T20 cricket, Salt is part of an exclusive list of batters who have scored at least 500 runs in the powerplay on a YoY basis (Indians generally do not make this list as they aren’t part of overseas leagues). Per this metric, the 28-year-old’s 2024 numbers were off the charts — 946 runs across the first six overs while striking at 172.6.

“It is high-risk at times, but it is also about putting the odds in your favour and not taking the risks you don’t want to,” he had told the broadcaster after his 33-ball 68 against Delhi Capitals last year (60 off those came in the powerplay). “That’s the sort of balance that every opening batter tries to strike. Sometimes you can miss the boat a few innings in a row, but you just gotta keep backing yourself and take those right options.”