A spin-to-win contest

Déjà vu hung in the air, much like the Kanpur haze, but nothing really repeated itself in totality. Shahid Afridi threatened an encore of his feats here two years ago, Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Yuvraj Singh launched an attack on their favourite whipping boys, the Pakistan bowlers, and Salman Butt was back to scoring big against India, but no one went the distance.

Much more significantly, the Pakistan chase started in similar blazing fashion to Mohali, and then slowed down in the middle overs where they ensured they had enough wickets in hand going in for the final assault. But there was one crucial change: the wicket, where the ball gripped and turned, would have made it difficult for someone like Afridi to come in and start hitting from the word go. That was probably why Pakistan gambled by sending Afridi to open the innings.

The crucial difference, though, was in how the teams used and played against the spinners. Dhoni had the confidence in his spinners, while Shoaib Malik tried to hide Abdur Rehman, Pakistan's only specialist spinner, as soon as the batsmen went after him. His first three overs, in which he got the ball to stay low at times but also rise sharply, gave him figures of 3-0-5-1, the wicket being Gautam Gambhir's wicket with a snorter. In his fourth over Yuvraj Singh hit Rehman for two sixes and Malik, in panic, took him off and brought him back on only after all the others had been bowled out. When he returned, to bowl over nos. 45, 47 and 49, his bowling wasn't special but, his final figures of 2 for 58 in seven overs were perhaps a trifle unfair to him.

India, when they were bowling, were always aware of the assistance the wicket held for the spinners; it seemed the faster bowlers, who between them took three wickets for 108 runs in the first 20 overs, were setting up the game for Harbhajan Singh and Murali Kartik and ensuring India did better in the middle overs here than in Mohali. The spinners responded by attacking - Harbhajan bowled his first spell with at least one slip, and sometimes two - and in the process dried the runs up.

The difference between the sides also lay in the way they batted against the spinners. The Indian batsmen struggled at the start, with the ball jumping, shooting and turning, but went on the offensive before they were done with the spinners. Yuvraj forced Malik to take Rehman off and Mahendra Dhoni, with two sixes in the next over, sent Malik packing as well.

The attack came without any warning. For five overs, both the batsmen had found themselves stuck at the wrong ends - Yuvraj struggling against the off breaks of Malik and Dhoni uncomfortable facing Rehman's left-arm spin. In those five overs - 29 to 33 - Yuvraj was dropped once and India managed only 13 runs. The next two overs cost 29 and off went Rehman.

In hindsight Pakistan probably erred in sticking to their plan - successful in Mohali - of blocking during the middle overs to launch an assault later. Yet again, this was perhaps a good toss for India to lose. Or maybe it wasn't, for had Kamran Akmal not dropped a sitter right at the start, and with the ball darting around in the first half hour, things could have been way different. Add the poor fielding standards and a wicket that broke to the list and examining the ifs and buts of this match is simply hair-splitting, for most of those factors evened themselves out. The use of spinners, however, did not.