Ganguly scores a Naught

This would be the match for all Ganguly crazy fans who would have been delighted by the return of the King and secondly for getting out for a naught in his second match for the Pune Warriors. However, it is not all about Ganguly in the game between Pune Warriors and Deccan Chargers. There were ten other players leaving Ganguly who could have got the job done for the Pune Warriors. But, all they could manage was a mere 136 runs which had chances of being chased down with minimum effort. But, the Deccan Chargers needed more than minimum effort to reach that target.

One thing for which the Pune Warriors need a pat on their back would be because they didn't lose all their ten wickets by saving one wicket toward the end of their innings. Some reconsideration needs in the Decan Chargers' captain giving the ball to J P Duminy when Ishanth Sharma could have been given another over who was not only a major strike bowler but also one among the bowlers who maintained a decent economy of 6.33 though not enough. Very rarely does a bowler end up with an over maiden in a T20 game and Amit Mishra was the lucky one in this regard.

In the Pune Warriors' innings, the highest individual score came from the blades of Mitchell Marsh who batted at number 8. And, may be because of his strokeplay, the Pune Warriors crossed the hundred run mark. One can imagine the fate of a team which has to rely on a number 8 batsmen to complete the innings. If that was all about the Pune Warriors, the Deccan Chargers were no less when it came to showing a dismal performance when they had to wait until the last over to score than winning run. A band of Yuvraj Singh, Ganguly, Uttappa and Jesse Ryder could only fill in the vacancies.

With limited resources, the Deccan Chargers did more than what was expected from them. The big names from the Deccan Chargers include Sangakkara, Dhawan and Duminy. But, that much was more than enough to chase down 136 successfully. Whatsoever, this is not the end of the roads for both teams and according to me, both teams lost when it comes to performing up to a certain level. But, as far as the rules of the game go, there can be only one winner at the most and that happened to be the Deccan Chargers. There are much more games to come.

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.