Despite his modest price-tag of $475,000, Yusuf Pathan is slowly emerging as the Most Valuable Player of IPL 2. It’s no coincidence that the 26-year-old has won all three Man of the Match awards in games that the Rajasthan Royals have won in this edition, and his useful bowling in the middle overs and power hitting are almost making up for last year’s MVP Shane Watson’s absence for the franchise.

Darren Berry, the director of coaching for the defending champions, laments the batting frailty of the team, conceding that they pin all their hopes on Yusuf, turning to him repeatedly to bail them out in one emergency after another. But the over-reliance on Yusuf might just be a blessing in disguise for Team India ahead of the World T20 next month.

His success as a finisher could be the missing piece in the puzzle that India skipper MS Dhoni has been looking for in a line-up boasting of Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Suresh Raina, Yuvraj Singh, Rohit Sharma, besides himself. The talk among members of the Indian think-tank, spread across different franchises, is that Yusuf could be a perfect fit at No 7, with Dhoni preferring to play measured knocks these days.

“Yusuf is an incredible finisher of a game. That’s what his role is, and should be,” says Jeremy Snape, Rajasthan’s high-performance coach. “We saw how he played in the last game against the short-pitched ball. He was hitting sixes, hooking the ball out of the ground. And we’ve seen how destructive he is against spin, in that Super Over against Kolkata.”

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