Three huge sixes kicked off Phil Salt’s IPL. Marco Jansen could only watch as one ball after the other was carted into the stands, the first picked up on width and deposited over long off, the second a shorter ball slapped square and the third nailed over extra cover. The boundaries came as a relief after a quiet start. Before hitting those sixes, Salt was one off five, with Sunil Narine also struggling to get the ball away at the other end. The boundaries provided a release.

By the end of the powerplay, KKR were in trouble. They’d lost three wickets, two in the space of three balls and were 43-3. Salt hadn’t hit another boundary since those sixes and his strike rate was falling fast. Ordinarily, that would be his cue to attempt a huge shot, mis-execute and continue the collapse. But, over the last year, Salt’s gone through something of a maturing.

A fifty on KKR debut for Phil Salt!

He now has three fifties from 10 IPL appearances.#IPL2024 pic.twitter.com/4GcdiXt1vh

— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) March 23, 2024

In 2022, Salt played 12 T20I innings. He passed 50 in two of them but was out for single figures in six. In the other four innings, he scored between 10 and 30 before he was dismissed. In all aside from one of those innings, his strike rate was less than 115. It spoke to a wider pattern of Salt’s temperament. When he came off, he was devastating, a blistering 88* off 41 balls against Pakistan that year a case in point. But the failures in between were too frequent to justify his place over others, and he struggled to play through tougher patches to score to capitalise later in the innings.

But 2023 was different. In eight T20I innings, Salt was dismissed only once before reaching 20. In all but two of those innings, he faced at least 20 balls before being dismissed. The back-to-back hundreds he scored against the West Indies struck an ominous note after he was overlooked in the auction.

“Seventies and eighties win you games,” Salt told Wisden Cricket Monthly ahead of the IPL. “Twenty-four off 12, although it’s putting your team in a good position, and there’s probably someone in their team on the back foot, you could probably question the value of how impactful that is, in the scheme of things.”

There have still been struggles. He had a poor run in the SA20, with a high score of 39. Despite that, when Jason Roy pulled out of the IPL, Salt was the like-for-like KKR called upon to replace him. And in the first match, he showed them he can be more than the hot-headed power-play whacker he’s been labelled as.

After the powerplay at Eden Gardens, Salt took stock. He didn’t hit a boundary for almost eight overs as wickets fell at the other end. KKR needed him to stay there, faced with a potentially devastating collapse to start their campaign. Unusually, he let his partner, Ramandeep Singh shoulder the bulk of the rate responsibility and by the end of the 12th over, Salt was nearing 50 with a strike rate of 137, while Ramandeep was on 35 with a strike rate of over 200.

By the time he was dismissed at the end of the 14th, he’d set the stage for Andre Russell to tee off in the final six. KKR ended up posting over 200, a score which seemed impossible at 53-4 at the end of the eighth over. While Russell’s explosion at the end got them there, a significant part of the credit should go to Salt, for playing the type of innings many would’ve said he wasn’t capable of.