Tuesday 26 April 2011

A mixture of batting and bowling

This match should go down as one of the best game this year's IPL has ever witnessed whatsoever. Just imagine a team piling up runs at a rate of just under 7.5 runs an over and is able to defend the same successfully and that too by a decent margin and doesn't bowl the opposition all out like it happens most of the time in limited overs game. This was what the Chennai Super Kings were found doing last night with the Pune Warriors being at the receiving end. Neither did the Pune Warriors lose all their ten wickets nor did they end on the winning side.

The only way thought of to be to defend a total of 142 in a T20 game is to bowl the opposition with restricting them to a lesser total would be out of question. And, as a rare chance that happens, the match would be a close encounter unlike what happened in yesterday's encounter between the Chennai Super Kings and the Pune Warriors. The entire match saw only one batsman scoring a half century with Australia's Mike Hussey being the hero of the match. Of course, a batsman from a team scoring 142 can hardly be expected to score a half century.

Making it still worse, a team with a total of 117 runs towards the end of the innings can have a batsman scoring a half century only in dreams and dreams rarely come true. One can take look at the bowling chart of both the teams playing with both the teams resorting to 6 bowlers, two of whom who bowl 2 overs and the remaining bowlers bowling their full quota of 4 overs each. One can forgive the Deccan Chargers in last night's game against Mumbai Indians but not the Pune Warriors in yesterday's game. A team with the likes of Yuvraj Singh and co should put up a decent performance.

The Pune Warriors were gifted with players like Jesse Ryder, Manish Pandey, Robin Uttappa, Yuvraj Singh etc who can do a lot with the at and on the other hand, they do not have the bowlers who can tackle the opposition batsmen. This is evident with the scorecard showing Rohith Sharma and Alfonso Thomas bowling four overs when Rohith Sharma can be expected to entertain the fans with the bat. Likewise, if not for Mike Hussey, no one really stood up to the occasion for the Chennai Superkings. One can imagine had there been no Mike Hussey what would or might have happened to the Chennai Super Kings.

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