Castrol Harsha Blog

so the mumbai indians are out of this year's ipl and they have four long days to endure before their last match, and their flight to mumbai. yes, i did say "out" because while there is an elaborate set of events that could materialise to put them into the semi-final, they will be the first to put their hands up and say that they are not among the top four teams this year.

so then, why are they not among the top four? when the team was put together it was clear that there were two assumptions on which a good run in the tournament was based upon. that in itself is not unusual-delhi daredevils bet heavily on the indian bowlers in their ranks, deccan chargers bet almost entirely on the overseas batsmen. however neither assumption came good. a good attacking number three in shikhar dhawan hardly got any cricket and had to go home with injury and the wicketkeeper didn't come good. mumbai indians played pinal shah for a long time and you can only play a keeper who can't really contribute with the bat if everyone else is pulling along nicely.

but the major reason is that the major players didn't deliver. jayasuriya had a couple of moments-he was nowhere near being the dominant player he was last year, tendulkar tried different positions and looked good without scoring as many runs as he threatened to. in retrospect number three was probably the best number for him with duminy to follow. zaheer khan was injured midway through and couldn't play too many games and harbhajan singh blew hot and blew cold.

there was one other reason, symptomatic of a deeper malaise. everytime the game got close mumbai indians seemed one step behind the opposition. you saw that in ipl 08 and now again in ipl 09.every close match was lost and there has to be a reason. my feeling is that there was anxiety about winning and often that is the greatest hindrance to winning.

the most fascinating paradox at the ipl is that the first team into the semi-final has done so with very little contribution from its opening pair. in the build up to the ipl, when teams were being analysed, the presence of sehwag and gambhir at the top for the delhi daredevils was considered one of the most crucial areas. they might still fire but they represent only one of many assumptions that have gone wrong (gambhir 204 from 11 innings and sehwag 107 from 7). they are classy players and may still come good and delhi are lucky that they have a few more opportunities before the knockout phase begins.

one possibility is that the spongy bounce here is not helping their timing. both are players who like the ball coming on and often, the quicker it comes the quicker it goes. unlike in the fifty over game (i actually heard one of my commentary colleagues refer to it as the "longer" form of the game!), they don’t have the time to assess the pitch and adjust. and you'll often find good players who are not in the best of form backing themselves to play the shots that they otherwise would have.

you'll notice therefore that if de villiers and dilshan fail to get going, delhi look vulnerable with only karthik really around to bail them out.

the other interesting thing that is happening at the top of the order comes from the chennai super kings. at one end they have a world beater, at the other it doesn't seem to matter. mathew hayden is comfortably the highest run scorer in the tournament (486 runs from 10 innings) but his majestic batting has concealed the fact that at the other end, his partners, parthiv patel, murali vijay and badrinath have scored a total of 109 runs between them. the danger with such skewed run scoring patterns (as with the daredevils) is that if the lead player has an off day he creates a situation that the side is not used to. it might almost benefit the super kings if hayden fails in the next game and the rest rise to the occasion.

in a tournament where slow bowling seems to hold the key, and where fast bowlers seem to value the slower ball more (on another note, if you bowl four balls at 110 kmph and two at 135kmph, are you bowling four slower balls or two faster balls?), it is interesting to see who is taking most wickets and who is being most stingy?

the flair captains have been doing well at the ipl. adam gilchrist was able to sneak overs out of a very limited attack against mumbai indians, shane warne got one out of rob quiney and from time to time will get abhishek raut to turn his arm over but perhaps the most dramatic example of this has been the decision of ms dhoni to go to suresh raina in the game against the kings xi.

dhoni has done this before, when he got raina inside the power play and turned the situation around. but there are two aspects to raina's two astonishing overs against yuvraj and jayawardene when the match seemed to be slipping out of the super kings' grasp. one, that raina was able to bowl the line he did (flat and full on leg stump against yuvraj) and that he had the cricketing acumen to know what to do in a situation like that. two, that dhoni believed in raina's acumen.

with one quality bowler (rp singh), another untested at this level (ryan harris) and absolutely nothing else to write home about, the deccan chargers defended a fairly ordinary score on a good batting wicket against the mumbai indians who are fast running out of steam. it showed once again that a team of committed players with nothing to lose has a chance against bigger names who seem to be labouring under the weight of expectations.

duminy is an interesting case. his average is excellent but his strike rate isn't. part of the reason is that he is playing in a team that has a tendency to capitulate. yet, he needs to improve that aspect of his cricket-play the big shots irrespective of what is happening at the other end. he is currently an excellent support player but the problem is that there is no one to support.

the other problem with the mumbai indians is that the bowlers don't bat and the wicket keeper at no 3 looks a bit out of his depth. at this level harbhajan should have been the bowling all rounder that teams crave for but after an excellent tour of new zealand, he is being outbowled by part-timers. that is the great thing about the ipl that you may not see in tournaments like the t20 world cup-enthusiastic young men taking on the big names and giving them a fight.

'leaden' i think is the word that best describes the mumbai indians and maybe, they need an ashraful in that line-up. but you have to hand it to gilchrist to take the field with that attack and believe he had a chance of winning. at the risk of repeating myself, it is the empowered young men who are winning games. man for man the chargers and the royals should be jostling with the knight riders at the bottom. but isn't it fantastic that in sport, as in life, you hang in there and you back yourself and the big names can be toppled?

today's blog is the story of two performances; both outstanding, both deserving of much credit but creating a vastly different impact on the match.

look at the scorecard for game 29 between the deccan chargers and the chennai super kings who are at last looking like the side they are. their impressive young left arm spinner shadab jakati had figures of 4-0-22-4. you cannot ask for more from a bowler in a cricket match. you look at the economy rate, you look at the strike rate and on both counts it is very impressive.

now look at the scorecard for game 28 between the mumbai indians and the royal challengers, bangalore. in his first game in the ipl, dillon du preez had bowling figures of 4-1-32-3; again excellent, even a maiden over in between, but really no match to jakati's figures. as it turned out, neither jakati nor du preez won the player of the match award-in the first case arguable, in the second inexplicable. but why?

when jakati got the ball, there was a counter attack on from dwayne smith and rohit sharma but the chargers had their back to the wall having been 1-3 and with little batting to follow. 4 wickets was excellent but it came against a side that was already hobbling. in his favour he dismissed both the dangerous batsmen but it was apparent that the game was over.

here's a quick one for all you to ponder over while you think about all the different ways in which this year's ipl is different. the top two teams lost on saturday and there were key performances from abhishek raut, sudeep tyagi and shadab jakati. if you were part of a quiz show and were asked what these three names did you might have been forgiven for not saying 'cricket'. but they are doing well and looking good. there must be a reason.

t20 is not a great respecter of reputation or tradition-that is why it connects so well to younger people around the world. the longer the game the greater the need for traditional skills, the shorter the game the greater the rewards for initiative, flair and explosive skills. a lot of young men in india, and indeed everywhere, have them but they need to be identified and tapped. having done that i believe we need to go one step further. we need to believe in them or, at any rate, give them the impression that we believe in them.

that is what extraordinary captains do and that is why the rajasthan royals are playing well over where they should be playing if you did a player by player analysis. we do that with teams sometimes-see how they stack up man for man. it is not a bad thing to do as a preliminary exercise but you need to include an x-factor-how driven are the players, how empowered are they by their captain? the last is crucial and maybe one of the x-factors as we try to put together a captaincy rating into the castrol index is to see how unheralded players are doing. or maybe to see how many of them are playing above expectation. it is a preliminary though but i am now more convinced than ever before, after watching the knight riders and seeing the royals that leadership and empowerment are the key factors in successful teams.

more interesting than the fake ipl blog, which is a lot of fun and a lot of fiction, is a peculiar trend that has emerged in this year's ipl. it is just one of the many ways in which this ipl is different from the dashing first edition we saw last year.

there are many trends; lower totals, lower run-rates at specific moments but two stand out. if you look at the overs that are producing wickets, you come across four big ones. overs 19 and 20 are easily understood since that is when caution gives way to recklessness-in life as in the end overs, it can be fraught with danger. but the next two are interesting. the largest number of wickets thereafter go down in overs 16 and 11.

you could put over number 11 down to a break in momentum though that is not an argument i am willing to buy at this level of cricket. batsman have to come in and get going anyway. now, it is evident, that the curse of over number 11 has got to the batsmen and they are trying to play safe-way too much importance to one variable, i suspect.

i believe therefore that the fall out is being seen in the 16th over. far too many teams are playing safe between 11 and 15 and realising by the time they get there that the asking rate has slipped too far ahead. 16 then becomes the over when they try to correct things. i can think of no other reason for this anamoly and i suspect as the tournament enters the back 7 games for each side it will start getting erased as teams start evening out their run chase. at the moment, they still haven’t got the right balance between preserving wickets and going after the runs. if we get scores of 160+ consistently, teams will have to play faster earlier and the anamoly of the 16th over might vanish.

confronted with low totals, or at any rate totals that are not himalayan, teams that are chasing are trying to adopt a safety first and mayhem later approach. you saw that especially with the mumbai indians when they chased 168 against the deccan chargers and a mere 120 against the king’s xi punjab. or for that matter in a rather more successful chase, rajasthan royals against delhi daredevils.

yusuf pathan was the saviour for the royals again, as indeed he was in the super over game against the kolkata knight riders. in fact he is making a very ordinary batting line-up (certainly that is the way it looks at this stage up) look better than it is. the mumbai indians on the other hand seem a lot more pedigreed and yet they have now fallen short in two chases and maybe there is a story there.

when confronted by what they think is a “gettable” total, teams can make the mistake of leaving too much for the end. that means they need to keep wickets and in fact, keeping wickets becomes a greater need than getting runs on the board. that makes everybody tense, the batsmen themselves, the players in the dug-out and supporters back home. one way to restore freedom to the batting side is to nominate two players who will play the same way independant of the situation and leave it to the other five to play measured innings. if five batsmen can’t win you a game in t20 you have a problem anyway.

teams like the mumbai indians though might be better served by staying ahead of the required run rate when the time out arrives. it is an interesting analysis to make. are teams that are behind the asking rate at the halfway point losing more matches than they win?