3 min readMar 22, 2026 09:57 PM IST In a 28-second video of an intra-squad match, Abhishek Sharma is seen putting the bowlers to sword. He is sashaying down the deck, manufacturing room and carving the bowlers through covers, slashing, slapping and scything with a pre-World Cup swagger. Above the video is a caption: “Puli was on fire yesterday.” Puli means a tiger in Telugu (though in Tamil and Malayalam, it means leopards). The emoji to the caption, too, was a tiger. In local parlance, puli is referred to anyone who is daring, or shows courage. Hyderabad, of course, is the (cricketing) home of Indian cricket’s real “Tiger”, the inimitable Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi. The reference “puli’ though puzzled, because it has not been a popular (localised) epithet for him, like “thala” for MS Dhoni, or “chetta” for Sanju Samson. Or the less localised versions like Hitman (Rohit Sharma), Kung-fu Pandya (Hardik) and the alliterative Boom Boom Bumrah (Jasprit). Last season, some of the Youtubers from Hyderabad even conducted a poll to find a moniker …