Saturday 27 / April / 2024
WHEN Quinton de Kock gloved a slow short ball to wicketkeeper Kedar Jadhav going for a pull in the 19th over, Shane Watson just stood there clapping. With 10 more balls remaining in the innings from which the Delhi Daredevils needed eight runs, the game was not hopelessly over at that stage to offer the rival a round of applause almost in gloomy submission to the inevitable, unpleasant destiny.
Watson was acting not in resignation. Nor was he nodding his head overawed by an incredible show of power-hitting. It was a spontaneous expression of genuine appreciation of poetry written in tranquility in turbulent times.
At five feet five inches, there was nothing monstrous about the physical aspect of de Kock’s game. He scored just three sixes, spread over 51 balls from the first over to the penultimate, all hit with sweet timing. The first one came off the first ball of the ninth over, which incidentally was the first six in the Daredevil s’ chase, and the last off the fifth ball of the 14th over. That was an unbelievable way of going after an imposing total.
Apart from the three sixes hit by de Kock, there was just another, scripted by Karun Nair late in the innings (in the 17th over), in the Daredevils’ successful chase of the 192-run target. Compare this to the seven brutal hits over the rope by the RCB, the eventual losers, and you get a picture of calmness displayed by de Kock. “Just one or two sixes were needed” — that’s how de Kock presented his game plan after the match. How unbelievably simple.
The normal way to go about chasing a total that required almost 10 runs an over in T20 cricket is definitely aerial, especially in the first six overs, which could help set the pace, grab the momentum and make things ideal for the monstrous hitters in the death overs. That’s how the Sunrisers tried to work it out in the first match when pitted against a massive total of 227 posted by the RCB at the same venue, when David Warner smashed three sixes inside the first six overs and two more before he was out in the ninth. The Sunrisers fell 46 runs short of the target. Does that mean the best way forward when chasing a big target is beating the de Kock trail?
It depends on what sort of guys a team got to wage their war. With guys like Chris Gayle, AB de Villiers, Brendon McCallum and Aaron Finch in the top order, we get to watch fireworks exploding in midair right from the word go. In that sense, it’s actually the limitations of the Daredevils that worked in their favour. Like how getting hit for 21 runs in the 16th over helped skipper Zaheer Khan come up with the back-of-a-length strategy executed brilliantly by Chris Morris and Mohammed Shami to put the brakes on the RCB in the death overs.
Possibilities open up for the RCB right from the moment Kohli and Gayle walk out to open the innings and the momentum is built/maintained/improved whether one or the other opener walks back to the dressing room early. There is ABD. There is Watson. There’s Sarfaraz. Unfortunately, there is nothing much after that.
On Sunday at M. Chinnaswamy stadium in Bangalore only two of the top five guns failed to boom and the team had a par score on the board — but their bowlers couldn’t deliver the goods. What happens when two or more in the top order fail?
The top-heavy, bottom-weak team, whose fortunes are heavily linked to how Kohli, Gayle and ABD fare, and who hadn’t made it to the final in the last two seasons despite the three guys entertaining the fans, seem stuck in the familiar flourish-flop rut. They might need unlikely heroes — Sarfaraz Khan in the first match in batting, for example — now and then to change the course of destiny.
The writer is a freelance contributor based in India. All the views and opinions expressed in the article are solely those of the author and do not reflect those of Times of Oman
