Wednesday 11 May 2011

Another debacle by another home team

This was one of the rare matches in T20 cricket where bowlers have everything to say right from the target what they understood would be chasable on that ground and secondly aiding their batsmen to try everything new. One can go through the scorecard to see that neither did the Deccan Chargers lose wickets nor did they be instrumental in getting to a match winning score. There have been matches that follow suit. So would be the fact that it is the home team that faces the music like yesterday Deccan Chargers lost to Pune Warriors. Lucky are those teams that do not host IPL matches.

The Deccan Chargers got off to a decent start with their top six batsmen getting double figures with notable ones being Shikar Dhawan's 24 followed by Ravi Teja's and J P Duminy's 30 runs. But, in the end what mattered was the big hitting factor which all the batsmen of the Deccan Chargers lacked. The highest strike rate was that of Shikar Dhawan with 141.17 and a score of 24. Or else there was Dale Steyn who stroke 183.33 runs for every 100 balls faced but managed an unbeaten 11 which was to hardly any avail. It is indisputable that the pitch favored the bowlers to a greater extent.

This time as well the Pune Warriors didn't quite experiment with their bowling by bringing 4 of their bowlers to bowl their complete quota. Yes, it is understood that there was no need to experiment with the bowling when the going was so smooth for them. Can anyone of you explain why Bhuvneshwar Kumar was allowed to bowl 3 overs when Shrikant Wagh bowled just 1 over when both of them gave away runs at 8.0 an over? The only thing that the Pune bowlers didn't do was to bowl extra deliveries if not for one wide delivery. So was the bowling accuracy of the pitch.

Mitchell Marsh's 4/25 from should I guess go down as the best bowling performance of at least this year's IPL. Life was not easy even for the Pune Warriors who took 18.2 overs to chase down that total which should have been achieved in at the most 15 overs. Kudos to Jesse Ryder and Manish Pandey who laid a solid foundation despite the ball doing its own tricks and joining hands with the bowler. If not for Duminy, no other bowler got belted from the Pune Warriors'. One man's presence that everyone would have been waiting for was Sourav Ganguly who didn't disappoint his fans.

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