Super sopper, super stopper

Play, miss, repeat
Thousands of insects buzzed around the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium when the match began, and at the end of it, while picking up the Player-of-the-Match award, Bhuvneshwar Kumar said he must have consumed three or four of them, inadvertently. But the insects were a symptom of the overcast weather in Hyderabad, and where there is heavy cloud, there is swing. And where there is swing, Bhuvneshwar is king.

When India met West Indies at the World T20 two years ago, Bhuvneshwar beat Dwayne Smith with the first two balls of the match. Now he did even better: he began with outswing, inswing outswing, outswing, and Smith didn't put bat to any of them. The second ball produced a loud lbw appeal, as Smith fell over while trying to flick, but the ball had swung too much to hit the stumps.

The swoop
Sunrisers Hyderabad's seamers were all over the Gujarat Lions batsmen, and Mustafizur Rahman's arrival had only made things worse for them. He should have had a wicket with his first ball, but Shikhar Dhawan, backtracking from backward point, put down a skier to let off Brendon McCullum.

There would be no such luck for Dinesh Karthik three balls later, when he looked to push Mustafizur through mid-on. He was playing against Mustafizur's angle, and against his left-arm spinner-esque break off the pitch, which opened him up and caused the ball to shoot towards backward point. It was going well wide of Kane Williamson, and to his left, but he threw himself at the ball, his feet further above the ground than his hand when it made contact with white leather, and came up with ball in hand and a confused expression on his face.

Williamson wasn't sure he had caught the ball cleanly, but replays showed he had, with his palm and fingers getting under the ball to cup it just in time.

Finch, in by less than an inch
It was the last ball of Lions innings, and Aaron Finch - batting on 49 - was on strike. Bhuvneshwar finished a fruitful day of bowling with a leg-stump yorker, and Finch squeezed it away into the leg side, not too far from Deepak Hooda at deep midwicket. He probably would have settled for a single at any other time in the innings, but this was the last ball. He sprinted hard for the first, turned and ran even harder for the second. He hurtled home at full stretch, just as Naman Ojha collected the throw and removed the bails.

The third umpire looked at replays from every possible direction, and it seemed he could rule it either way. Was the tip of Finch's bat on the line or just - a millimeter or two - past it? The third umpire went with not out, Finch finished unbeaten on 51 and Sunrisers reached 126. It could have been one hell of a moment in a closer match than this one.

Super sopper, super stopper
Sunrisers were 54 for 2 after nine overs of their chase, and needed 73 off 66 balls, on a difficult, often two-paced pitch. A strategic time-out had just ended. With Dwayne Bravo about to begin a potentially decisive spell, a bit of tension joined the bugs in the air around the stadium. Bravo walked to the top of his run-up, and just stood there. The countdown had ended, but the time-out wasn't over just yet. A couple of Super Soppers, which had come out to clear a bit of dew from the outfield, had come to a grinding halt inside the boundary. The ground-staff appeared, harried looks on their faces, and after a couple of shoves got the hulking machines to rumble out of the playing area.