Dinesh Karthik helmet: Why Dinesh Karthik wears different helmet than other batters?

Dinesh Karthik helmet: The veteran Indian wicket-keeper batter has received a lot of accolades for his match-winning innings tonight.

Veteran India and Royal Challengers Bangalore wicket-keeper batter Dinesh Karthik has managed to become a topic of discussion on the back of finishing two consecutive innings successfully in the ongoing 15th season of the Indian Premier League.

A second stint with Royal Challengers has begun exceedingly well for Karthik. Having scored 90 runs at a strike rate of 204.54 without getting out in three innings, Karthik has not only won matches for his team but also become the third-best batter in terms of highest strike rate (minimum 50 runs) in IPL 2022.

While scoring quickfire runs isn’t anything new to the 36-year old Karthik, him doing it after a lean patch at Kolkata Knight Riders is what is making people all the more happier for him. In his last two IPL seasons for KKR, Karthik had scored 392 runs in 29 innings at an average and strike rate of 17.82 and 128.95 respectively including a solitary half-century.

Dinesh Karthik helmet

Other than Karthik’s ability of finishing innings especially in the shortest format, what has caught the attention of fans is his batting helmet. In what is a slightly unconventional helmet, Karthik doesn’t wear a more commonly used helmet while batting.

It is worth mentioning that there’s no special reason per se due to which Karthik wears such an uncommon helmet. While (light) weight of this helmet could be one technical reason, choice of equipment mostly comes down to personal preferences depending from athlete to athlete.

In what is not the first time when Karthik has used such a helmet, there have been instances in the past where his wicket-keeping helmet has also differed from fellow keepers. Karthik’s wicket-keeping helmet on multiple occasions in both international cricket and IPL has been more of a baseball-type face protector guard (permitted by the rules of cricket).

Uncapped India batter Rahul Tripathi, Karthik’s teammate at Knight Riders last season (currently at Sunrisers Hyderabad), also wears a similar type of batting helmet. Former Sri Lanka captain Kumar Sangakkara and former England batters James Taylor and Michael Carberry also used to support such types of helmets back in the day.