KOLKATA: Rinku Singh is a perfect candidate for the Cinderella story. Having refused the job of mopping floors and instead choosing to follow the call of his heart to play cricket, the Rinku Singh story took the perfect turn on Sunday evening when his five sixes in the final over fetched Kolkata Knight Riders an improbable win over Gujarat Titans.
Rinku was a sensation in a blink of the eye. Suddenly, he was the hero that cricket constantly seeks. Rinku was good with the bat, but no one had realised he was this good.
“I have worked really hard on my game,” Rinku was quoted by KKR Knight Club, the IPL team’s official website on Monday. “I only wanted to play cricket as I knew there was nothing else for me. I focused only on cricket. It is paying dividends now.”
As he recollected his journey from oblivion to stardom, the youth from Aligarh hasn’t forgotten the crucial crossroad where he had been forced to take a decision that changed his destiny.
“I hadn’t even started playing cricket when I was asked to take up a job along with my brother. It was to mop the floor of a coaching centre. I refused,” he says with a smile. “I didn’t have academics to back me, yet I chose cricket.”
All the five brothers played the game, even though their father, a hawker, was dead against it.
“Father would hit us whenever he found us playing cricket,” Rinku recalls. “Mother was somewhat supportive.” In fact, Rinku’s mother even borrowed Rs 1000 from a neighbouring shop so that he could go to Kanpur for a tournament.
Wherever he played, Rinku was noticed for his talent and many people came forward to help. With rustic politeness, he rattles off names of people who lent him a helping hands at some stage of his career.
“I would practice at a government stadium, which did not require a lot of money. All I had to do was to get a card made in my name.”
Although he went for the UP state U-16 trials in 2010-11, he could not make the cut.
“I had no idea what is was or what playing at the state level means.”
Next year, he was back at the trials, with a lot more knowledge about what a selection would mean to him. This time, he made the cut and was immediately among runs.
“Things only moved up from there,” Rinku says. His U-19 debut was even better.
“I played in the Ranji Trophy that year itself and did fairly well. That gave me the belief that I could play for India.”
Meanwhile, he played in a schools’ tournament, where he was the man-of-the-match in the final and was gifted a motorbike.
“My father had come to watch the final. He must have realised I was doing something good as he never hit me again for playing cricket.”
Although he made his IPL debut for Punjab in 2017 (Rs 10 lakh), Rinku’s fairytale moment came when he was picked up by KKR the next year for Rs 80 lakh.
“No one in my family had seen so much money,” he says. “We could pay off our loans and even buy a house.”
It might be recalled that Rahul Tewatia (ironically, part of the Gujarat Titans squad this year), too smashed five sixes in an over in 2020, which brought him into India contention. Will Rinku’s sixes bring similar fortunes?
Only time will tell whether that happens or not, but bowlers world over will at least start taking Rinku more seriously.
