Shardul and Prince aimed for the blockhole, found some luck along the way, and set a template for other teams to emulate against SRH
Karthik Krishnaswamy27-Mar-20252:49
Fuller and straighter – the best plan against SRH?
Is today the day for 300? That question follows Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) wherever they go these days, and with good reason: before Thursday, they had posted four of the five highest totals in IPL history over their last 16 innings. They had come meaningfully close to that 300 mark once every four innings.Thursday looked like a good candidate for 300 day – ESPNcricinfo’s preview headline said as much. SRH were playing at home, in Hyderabad, where they had made 277 last season and 286 in their most recent match, against Rajasthan Royals (RR) four days earlier. They were facing a Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) attack that had begun the season in a full-blown injury crisis. Their pace attack for this game included a bowler who had gone unsold at the auction, a bowler with no IPL experience coming into this tournament, and a bowler coming back from injury.And Rishabh Pant, LSG’s captain, won the toss and asked SRH to bat. There was no limit, in the form of a target, to stop them from gunning for 300.Related
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In the end, SRH didn’t get there. They didn’t even get to 200. And it wasn’t because they suddenly came up against bowler-friendly conditions. After the match, their captain Pat Cummins suggested that the fast bowlers found a bit of grip when they bowled cutters, but this had otherwise been an excellent pitch to bat on. “The other day [this] was the world’s best wicket, today’s was probably the second-best.”What happened, then, to cause the SRH of Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, Ishan Kishan, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Heinrich Klaasen, and so on and so forth, to stumble to 190 for 9?What happened was, well, many things. But among all those things was a hugely impressive bowling performance that, apart from leading LSG to their first win of the season, perhaps also showed a way for other teams to bowl to SRH and other, similarly no-holds-barred, IPL line-ups.LSG came with a plan, and that plan was evident right from the first over, when Shardul Thakur went noticeably full to Head. It wasn’t just full in the way that new-ball bowlers bowl when they are searching for swing, but full as in aiming for the blockhole or the wide blockhole – with deep point as one of the two boundary fielders. Thakur’s attempts at landing the yorker weren’t quite successful, and two ended up as full tosses, but the intent was clear. It was only the 11th time in IPL history, as per ESPNcricinfo’s logs, that a bowler had sent down two or more full tosses in the first over of an innings.It’s not rare for bowlers to attempt the occasional yorker in the powerplay – particularly if the ball is swinging – or through the middle overs, but they rarely use it persistently in these phases. That only tends to happen at the death. This wasn’t the case on Thursday, when LSG seemed to treat the entire innings as an extended exercise in death bowling.1:28
What makes Shardul Thakur effective?
Prince Yadav exemplified this. He struck with his third ball, bowling Head with a full one aimed at the base of the stumps, and kept attempting stump-to-stump yorkers and wide yorkers right through his four overs, the eighth, tenth, 12th and 14th of SRH’s innings. He seemed a natural at executing the yorker, bowling them at a sharp pace – up in the high 130s, usually (kph) – and getting the odd one to swerve late, into the right-hander and away from the left-hander. Ever so often, he threw in a short ball, hard-length ball or slower cutter – often on a wide line – to keep the batters guessing.This, again, was death bowling before the death overs. And it made sense: if a batting line-up is going to treat every over as a slog over, it might not be a bad idea for the bowlers to do likewise.In all, LSG’s fast bowlers sent down 14 yorkers or full-tosses in the first 16 overs of SRH’s innings. Only three times in IPL history have teams bowling first (teams defending totals have been excluded from this comparison since dew tends to inflate full-toss numbers) exceeded this figure. It’s instructive that five of the top seven instances have occurred in the last two seasons, when scoring rates have shot through the roof.It won’t always be successful, of course. SRH’s last match, against RR, began in similar fashion to this one, with Fazalhaq Farooqi showing clear intent to bowl yorkers and sending down two full-tosses in the first over. It just so happened that he, and most of his colleagues, endured days when a: their execution went awry, and b: they veered away from their plans in response.Prince Yadav cleaned up Travis Head for 47•AFP/Getty ImagesLSG showed far more faith in their plans. But here’s the thing – they were able to, or were allowed to, because luck went their way at key moments, preventing SRH from building any real momentum. Thakur picked up two wickets in two balls at the start of his second over, and the fates of both balls could have been different on another day. First, he banged one into the pitch, and Abhishek – perhaps not expecting this, because both Thakur and Avesh Khan had shown more of an inclination to bowl full than short – miscued his pull to deep square-leg. Then Kishan, SRH’s centurion against RR, went first ball, strangling the most innocuous of balls down the leg side. The sort of wicket that Thakur seems to get more often than most bowlers.An even bigger slice of luck came in the 12th over, when Prince dropped a return catch from Reddy but inadvertently deflected the ball into the stumps behind him, catching Klaasen out of his crease.All this added up, and even as SRH kept batting in the SRH way, with Aniket Verma and Cummins hitting eight sixes between them in just 25 balls, they had lost enough wickets earlier in their innings for their tail to be within sight of LSG’s bowlers. When Cummins departed, LSG were bowling to Nos. 9 and 10 with 15 balls remaining. Only 14 runs came off those 15 balls.A good helping hand from luck, then, but that often happens to winning teams in T20 contests. LSG came into this game against one of the most frightening T20 line-ups of all time with a patched-together bowling attack from which little was expected. They came with a plan, however, and did most things in their power to put those plans into action. Along the way, they may also have shown other teams a trick or two.
