SRH vs RR highlights - Shahbaz and Co turn the game Sunrisers' way

"There's nothing more satisfying than hearing a big crowd go silent." Pat Cummins, November 18, 2024. The next day he took Virat Kohli's wicket and made a ground with 100,000 people feel like a ghost town.

"We have earned the right to have one of those days and still win tournaments." Pat Cummins, May 21, 2024. It's taken a little while longer for him to walk the talk but boy when he says something we best listen. Sunrisers Hyderabad marched into the final of IPL 2024 and this time they did it with their bowling.

It looked like Rajasthan Royals had won a crucial toss and they did the right thing by opting to chase. One square boundary was significantly shorter than the other (61m vs 72m) and asymmetry like that makes it really hard to defend totals, especially if the dew came in, but it didn’t. All of a sudden SRH had a dry ball and a dry pitch. Cummins worked a miracle out of that.

SRH produced a 33-ball period without a single boundary using bowlers whom they haven't really had to turn to but were there now at this crucial time. This 33-ball period also included four wickets. Shahbaz Ahmed who hadn't picked up a wicket since April 5 turned up with 4-0-23-3 tonight.

Taking pace off once more, he gets rid of Rovman Powell with a slower bouncer.

Trent Boult is out there batting right now. That's never ideal in a chase.

Dhruv Jurel is still out there fighting. These are the 12 balls between the 15th and 16th overs. Some of these shots were so high quality, particularly an inside out drives to a ball that were pitching in line with the stumps and threatening both it and the outside edge. There was a reverse sweep to pick out the short boundary and a blistering straight drive too.

"There's nothing more satisfying than hearing a big crowd go silent." Pat Cummins, November 18, 2024. The next day he took Virat Kohli's wicket and made a ground with 100,000 people feel like a ghost town.

"We have earned the right to have one of those days and still win tournaments." Pat Cummins, May 21, 2024. It's taken a little while longer for him to walk the talk but boy when he says something we best listen.

SRH are marching into the IPL final. Because there is no dew, the ball has stayed dry. The pitch in Chennai is always dry. That means one thing. Turn. Big turn. Even the part-timers are making it hard to score.

And that means the ball is pitching and gripping.

SRH have brought on Abhishek Sharma's left-arm spin to try and exploit it and its worked.

Sanju Samson's gone. This game has turned around.

Good aggressive captaincy from Cummins. Ever since that Unadkat over immediately after the powerplay, it was clear the pitch was helping any time pace was taken off it.

That's why Cummins went to Shahbaz even though he would be bowling into the hitting arc of the left-hander. With the left-hander gone, it had already gotten better for SRH, but Cummins wanted to push that advantage. Brought on Abhishek who has bowled only three overs in this IPL prior to this game. Sensible thought process. Gut feel decisions. Outstanding stuff.

Massive MAASSSIVE breakthrough.

The left-hander is gone. Jaiswal 42 off 21. Shahbaz Ahmed bowling left-arm spin into his hitting arc has taken him out.

SRH will be able to PILE on the pressure now. That long boundary becomes a weapon now. They'll have two right-handers at the crease and all they have to do is slant their line towards whichever side of the ground is bigger.

After bleeding runs in the last over of the powerplay to on-pace deliveries, SRH turn to their specialist slower-ball bowler and Jaydev Unadkat doesn't disappoint.

It wasn't like Jaiswal and Samson were trying to play him out. Both of them tried to go after Unadkat's slower bouncers but both of them were beaten. The better than average bounce in this pitch and its ability to suck pace off the ball - especially those cutters - will make it hard for batters to line it up.

Not just for his batting but simply for the fact that he is a left-hander. That ensures RR have access to the short boundary in every over.

SRH's succes so far in this powerplay has been from hitting the pitch hard and refusing to give the batters any room. TKC moving around a lot and never having a solid base played into that.

Jaiswal though has been keeping still. He's been waiting for the ball to come to him and he can do that because his mind isn't scrambled. He's seen that SRH's game plan is to go on pace. And he got into all the right positions to use it. Look at what he's done to Bhuvneshwar Kumar's third over, the sixth of the innings.

Tom Kohlier-Cadmore has had lots of success in other leads. He's won them even, just off his own bat. But the IPL is a level up. He was 6 off 13 today. Trying all sorts of things. Moving down the pitch and around the crease. Stopping to take breaks because he was melting in the heat. He was really uncomfortable. SRH made him feel that way by keeping such tight lines and exploiting the bounce on this pitch while the ball is hard and new. With every mishit, the pressure on him grew. He managed a four to get to 10 off 14 but then fell next ball looking to hit the boundary again because he had fallen so far behind.

Check out the death bowling by RR with Klaasen at the crease for a majority of it. Just four boundaries, and one of those was off the outside edge, in the last four overs. They won a crucial toss. Trent Boult provided the early wickets, including Abhishek's in the first over. Sandeep Sharma was the surprise package, sussing out the conditions beautifully and going slower ball after slower ball. He nailed Travis Head with a slower bouncer and then surprised Heinrich Klaasen with a slingy yorker. Avesh Khan focused on high pace and backed himself to execute. Sandeep and Avesh really strangled SRH, allowing them to go at only a run a ball, while taking five wickets.

What a yorker!

And what a time to bowl it!

It looks like it got a little bit of dip really really late. Made his action go more slingy too. That's maybe why it snuck underneath the bat.

Klaasen was setting up to go down the ground. Then he realised the length wasn't there. Then he realised he was going to miss it. Then he missed it.

Incredible stuff from Sandeep.

Klaasen doing really well here. He's 50 off 33 balls. He's put all his energy into being out there at the back end and that means there's every chance that a 20-run over is coming up. His strike rate in overs 16-20 is 217.

All this good work by RR will be undone if they end up conceding 180-190, because as Samson himself said, their batting's only been working at 70% efficiency. The strength of their bowling attack means they don't have as much depth in the batting as other teams.

For the second game in a row, Sunrisers have had to use their impact player in the first innings itself, to shore up a stop-start batting innings. Though, Shahbaz Ahmed does give them a bowling option later on too.

Usually when fast bowlers try to nail the quick wide yorker, they run in with third back on the boundary. That's to save the single. Here, RR have done something different. They had two short thirds. And that field has now given them a wicket.

Nitish Kumar Reddy was 1 off 5 at one point. He was playing that way in order to steady the wobble and push the game deep. It's a good plan. It's the kind of plan CSK use to succeed here. Their formula for victory is to do the simple things right and make fewer mistakes.

The biggest threat to that kind of mindset is a knockout game. You know in the back of your mind, especially when you're 1 off 5, that you cannot keep going like this. You have to take risks. NKR looked to take his risks first by walking across his stumps and trying to access to short leg side boundary in the 14th over. But Avesh denied him with wide yorkers.

Seeing the length the fast bowler was focusing on, NKR looked for a reverse scoop. It's a decent option with no one in the deep behind square on the off side. The fact that it doesn't come off is huge credit to Avesh's execution. Because he DID NOT give NKR the option to get under the ball. That over ends with another wicket, Abdul Samad's stumps being decimated. Shane Bond, the RR bowling coach, came out and gave Avesh a big hug. Impressive skills being shown by RR here.

The sequence of play between 7.4 overs and 12.4 overs. Ashwin, Sandeep and Chahal on song.

When SRH were last in Chennai, they were done in by the off-pace bowlers. And as that was happening, the DJ brought out a song called "Enga area ulla varathe" which means "this is our place, don't you come in."

Batting in Chennai requires more gears than all out attack. It often feels like the pitch changes dramatically after six overs. Until that time, you can mis-hit the ball and still find the boundary because there are only two fielders on the boundary. After that time, with five fielders patrolling, the slowness of the pitch takes hold.

Sandeep Sharma understood that so well when he came back to bowl the 10th over. Three of those six balls were off pace. One of them got rid of Heat, caught at short third ramping a slower bouncer.

This is probably the match right here. SRH don't just have a left-right combo out there, they have Head and Klaasen. Two high-quality batters with the skill to take down any bowling attack and to do it over a long period of time. They don't need ideal entry points. They've got all the gears necessary.

Yuzvendra Chahal was able to protect the short legside boundary against Head. But he turned the strike and Klaasen accessed his short legside boundary with ease. It was a pretty good ball too. Essentially the same one that dismissed Virat Kohli in the Eliminator. Pushed through the front of the hand, which means it doesn't really bounce a lot. Kohli expected regular bounce and got it off the bottom of the bat.

The only problem here, though, is the length was slightly short and Klaasen immediately rocked back and played a pull shot with a straight bat, mindful of how front-of-the-hand balls skid through low. He's got such a good sense for attacking spin.

These were the two overs immediately after the double-wicket over from Boult.

Heinrich Klaasen has become one of the best six hitters in T20 cricket. No ground is too big for him as he ranks alongside Nicholas Pooran and Andre Russell on the hitting most sixes since the beginning of last IPL. There is no better batter of spin in this format thatn Klaasen. There is an method and a lot of batting mechanics in play in Klaasen’s six-hitting which he explained in an in-depth interview to be published on ESPNcricinfo soon during T20 World Cup.

During the conversation Klaasen spoke about how important rotation of strike and how a few dot balls can easily become a speed bump and create havoc. We tapped into that point to see where Klaasen ranks in terms of the dot balls percentage. Among 92 batters to have faced a minimum of 100 balls in IPL 2023 and 2024, Klaasen has the lowest dot % at 23.24%.

If you expand the filter to all T20s since the start of 2023, Klaasen has the lowest dot percentage (23.25) among 114 batters to have faced at least 500 balls where ball-by-ball data is available. Among the top-5 in this list are: Sam Hain (24.17), Mitchell (26.28), Stubbs (26.63) and Markram (27.47)

Pace is a much better option to deal with Tripathi. 27 of the 32 times that he has fallen in the powerplay, he has fallen to pace, and it happens again. RR used Boult for a third over in the Eliminator. He's much better with the new ball than the old. That's sensible planning. And it's worked again. Tripathi gone. AND MARKRAM GONE TOO!

Boult did something really brave in that over. He had the short boundary on the off side for the right-hander and he dangled it out for the batter. However, he made sure to take pace off when Tripathi was loving having it on the ball, and that meant his ramp could only go as far as short third. That brought a new batter in and because he was new - Markram hasn't played the last few games as well - he wasn't ready for the bounce on this pitch. A flat-bat, through the line, slap through cover went off the top edge to short third.

Rahul Tripathi is an ace in the powerplay. Sometimes he even sacrifices his own runs for the sake of being extra aggressive in this period.

Royals would have planned to pair Ashwin with SRH's two left-handers. Now they've got to deal with a guy has immense clarity about his role in any team and the selflessness to pull it off. Tripathi against spin is a contest in favour of the batter. Especially in the powerplay. Average of 40, SR of 137.

Abshishek Sharma had the short boundary on the leg side in that first over. That was a significant handicap that Boult had to deal with and he dealt with it well. Immediately shifted his line wider and banged the length in shorter.

The reason Boult got the short boundary on the leg side is because RR wanted to give the long boundary on the leg side for the left-hander to R Ashwin. Once more, their plans are spot on. Although now SRH have a right-left batting combination out there. The short boundary is available to them in every over

Abhishek Sharma and Travis Head as a combo have done things that have been unheard of. But they're both left-handers. Could there have been any thought put into separating them so that SRH have a right-left combination, which will be able to exploit these ground dimensions better? Prolly not. Just because the big boundary is 75m doesn't mean it's actually big enough for these two. Travishek have been decimating bowling attacks

Sanju Samson, who mentioned there was a bug going through the dressing room, says they are all feeling much better today. He's also done them a HUGE favour by winning a second successive toss. He says they've been batting 70% of their potential this IPL.

Pat Cummins says he wanted to bowl too - which is significant because they like batting first, they've had a lot of success batting first. So maybe this might still work in their favour. Markram and Unadkat are back in the XI. Here are the playing XIs.

A reminder that if you would like to follow commentary in Hindi, we have you covered.