Long before the boos, the captaincy debates and the whispers of dressing-room fractures, Hardik Pandya was the swaggering young boy Mumbai Indians discovered before the rest of Indian cricket truly understood him.
He arrived in the IPL in 2015 as an unknown all-rounder from Baroda with explosive bat speed, restless ambition and the kind of self-belief that could look like arrogance to outsiders. Mumbai Indians saw something others did not. They backed him, polished him and turned him into one of the defining cricketers of India’s T20 generation.
