Tilak Varma may be only 23, but he was very much among the chosen five—alongwith Rohit Sharma, Suryakumar Yadav, Hardik Pandya and Jasprit Bumrah—to have been retained by Mumbai Indians when they rebooted in the last mega auction. He showed a maturity far beyond his age to adapt his batting as per the match situation since his IPL debut in 2022. The only thing missing in his IPL track record till Monday, 20 April, was a century.

And it came when the team needed it the most against a consistent Gujarat Titans at the later’s fortress—ending a four-match losing streak for the five-time champs. The pressure of losing that many matches in a row in IPL can often make the most successful of teams look like a divided camp—and it was not an exception with the Mumbai Indians. A seventh spot on the table, with two wins from six matches, may not look as healthy as the team would like to be but it at least gives them a plank to bounce back.

A 45-ball century—joint fastest for MI with Sri Lankan legend Sanath Jayasuriya achieving it in the inaugural 2008 edition—must have come as a huge relief for Tilak who had scraped together 43 runs from previous five innings. He followed the time-tested method of spending sometime in the middle, scoring only 17 runs from the first 20 balls before exploding at the backend of the innings.       

‘’It (101 not out) was very important for the team and for me,’’ Tilak told the broadcasters. ‘’Over the last four or five games, the one thing constantly running through my head was that I hadn’t spent much time in the middle and hadn’t faced many balls, so my aim was to spend some time at the wicket and then adapt according to the team's situation.’’

 Explaining his approach, Tilak said he assessed the pitch early and focused on straight hitting to counter the slow nature of the wicket. ‘’Whenever MI comes to Ahmedabad, they usually give us a black soil wicket, which is a bit slow in nature. It’s not that our batters cannot adapt, but we know what we can do if there is more bounce,’’ said Tilak, a key member of the Men in Blue in T20 format with a T20 World Cup and Asia Cup already on his shelves.

 ‘’Since it was slow and low, we had to adjust and try to hit straight. There wasn’t much bounce, so playing across the line to deliveries in line with the stumps was risky. I decided to hit straighter and I read the conditions well; thankfully, I was able to score some runs.’’

While his lacklusture batting form possibly saw him coming in at number five, which needed him to explode in the last six overs, Tilak was candid enough to say that his preferred position is number three. ‘’Personally, I like batting at number three a lot. However, I am happy to bat wherever the team needs me because since childhood, I have practised in a way that allows me to play confidently in any position. But if someone asks me, I would always say number three.’’

With the monkey off his back with the runs flowing off his bat, Tilak was optimistic about a turnaround though there is now a major question mark over Suryakumar Yadav’s dry run. ‘’We know what we are capable of, having several World Cup winners in the side, experienced players, and the skills we possess. If we execute well, we can be unstoppable. So it is important to keep our heads down and continue working hard," he said.

The athletics community of India has been left redfaced with the classification by anti-doping watchdog of World Athletics' as India being an ‘extremely high risk’ category for substance abuse. The Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) has changed the grading of Athletics Federation of India from ‘B’ to ‘A’— raising a chatter whether it will interfere with the country’s Olympics 2036 ambitions.

‘’The AIU move has nothing to do with India’s bid for Olympics or hosting of Commonwealth Games,’’ claimed Adille Sumariwala, a former long serving AFI president and one of the vice presidents of World Athletics. Speaking to National Herald, the Olympian and former sprint ace said they would not be in denial about the global body’s action and felt it gives them an opportunity to "clean up the system".

 The AIU statement says: “This decision, recently taken by the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) Board, relates to the consistently extremely high risk of doping in India which has ranked in the top two for the most Anti-Doping Rule Violations (ADRVs) in athletics between 2022 and 2025. In 2022, India recorded 48 ADRVs (ranked 2nd); in 2023, 63 (ranked 2nd); in 2024, 71 (ranked 1st) and for 2025, India has recorded 30 ADRVs so far (ranked 1st) (note: there will be a substantial time lag in reporting the final ADRV numbers).”

AIU chairperson David Howman made a damning indictment about the health of doping control in Indian athletics: “The doping situation in India has been high-risk for a long time and, unfortunately, the quality of the domestic anti-doping programme is simply not proportionate to the doping risk. The AIU will now work with the AFI to achieve reforms to safeguard the integrity of the sport of athletics, as we have done with other Category A Member Federations.”

Making a case for India, Sumariwala said: ‘’If you scan the cases of violations in India, one will see the number of elite athletes is very negligible—they are mostly young athletes in minor events who have often got swayed by their coaches. We have said before that the rise in number of positive cases in recent times is because of the rise in number of tests and there again, the numbers have come down after 2025.’’

However, recent examples have thrown up some prominent names like discus thrower Seema Punia, a former Asian Games gold medallist, who has been handed a 16-month ban and will miss the Asiad later this year. Dhanalakshmi Sekar, a prominent 27-year-old sprinter from Tamil Nadu, has been handed a eight-year ban by the National Anti Doping Agency (NADA) on 30 December last year for a second doping offence—raising concerns that the AFI is up against a tough challenge.

A Wada (World Anti Doping Agency) report last year branded India as the world’s worst doping offender for a third consecutive time with a record 260 cases of drug abuse by athletes in 2024. The figure was the highest among all countries that conducted 5,000 or more tests—reflecting a positivity rate of 3.6 per cent.

 A AFI press release said on Tuesday: ‘’AFI has also strongly advocated for the criminalisation of those responsible for doping—particularly at the grassroots—to deter coaches and parents from exploiting young athletes.

 ‘’With continued collaboration between the AIU, NADA, and the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, AFI is confident that India will overcome this challenge and soon be removed from Category A,’’ the statement added.