Swing and miss: PBKS 'lost the battle but not the war'

Punjab Kings had built up their playoffs aspirations all season. They had dreamt of this moment. On podcasts, at press conferences and over Instagram stories with inspiring music. Their batting line-up had been among the most dominant, and their openers had got stuck into bowling attacks, unperturbed by reputation.

To be in this position with the arc lights on them on home territory was a dream scenario. But a lost toss against a gun bowling attack on a surface with swing, devilish seam and spongy bounce wasn't the cocktail they'd hoped for.

In the dugout, James Hopes, their bowling coach, had seen enough from the surface six balls into the game that he quietly chuckled to himself wondering why Royal Challengers Bengaluru hadn't brought on Josh Hazlewood in the second over right away. This was going to be a challenge unlike any other, perhaps closest to the one they faced against Kolkata Knight Riders at the same venue in the league stage.

That night, they had a fiery Marco Jansen and the crafty Yuzvendra Chahal in their ranks to help pull off the lowest-successful defence in IPL history. Neither was available here; Jansen was away preparing for the World Test Championship final and Chahal was nursing an injury he hadn't sufficiently recovered from. But before they could worry about their bowling resources, there was a simple matter of putting up runs.

Priyansh Arya is instinctive mostly. Fast hands and picking lengths early are his bread and butter. But three balls into the second over, he was neither able to get to the pitch nor hit it over and the sticky surface had its first victim. At slip, Virat Kohli urged every bowler to keep hitting the deck hard. Behind the stumps, Jitesh Sharma struggled to find his footing, leaving skid marks at both ends as he wrestled with the extra bounce.

For PBKS, there was nothing 'homely' about the surface, yet they kept going for their shots. Twice Prabhsimran Singh swung as he charged and tried to negate Bhuvneshwar Kumar's swing. But the third time, he was completely off balance trying to slog and nicked behind to Jitesh as Bhuvneshwar shortened his length.

Those two wickets had been lost even before Hazlewood came on. As Shreyas Iyer took strike, it's unlikely his match-ups against Hazlewood and Bhuvneshwar would've been on his mind. Rajat Patidar sent short fine to the boundary, but with midwicket and mid-on in, Iyer looked to hit over the infield, only to be dismissed by an ill-judged slog. By then, there was already a sense of inevitability.

PBKS didn't buckle down still. Josh Inglis was out to the pull again, off Hazlewood, trying to force the pace in front of square. But at 38 for 4 their hopes were fast fading. "We were a bit befuddled, to be honest, in terms of reading the wicket," Iyer said after the match, the wounds from the loss still raw. "A lot of wickets we lost [were kind of] random. So, yeah, there's a lot to go back and study on."

The only semblance of pressure PBKS seemed to shift back on the bowlers was when Marcus Stoinis muscled a few away. But with him trying to literally slog every ball out of the ground, he was skating on thin ice. He was quietly taken out by a Suyash Sharma googly that proved to be deadly accurate. He'd picked up a third wicket, to go with the earlier strikes of Shashank Singh and Impact Player Musheer Khan, both out to the wrong'un - one slogging, and the other sweeping.

Hopes echoed Iyer's call for soul-searching, while also warning against the pitfalls of backing down at a new venue on a new pitch come Qualifier 2. "The worst thing our batsmen can do now is blink and start jumping at shadows and second-guessing themselves," Hopes said. "We know historically it's a very good pitch [in Ahmedabad].

"We know we're going to have to go quite hard and score quite quickly. It's not back to the drawing board by any means. We worked two-and-a-half months to get into a position where we get a second opportunity, and we're going to have to use our second opportunity now."

For a brief passage in the second innings, with Kyle Jamieson hooping the ball around, you couldn't quite tell which team was under the pump. Kohli had just been taken out in true Test match style, of the kind that troubled him repeatedly in Australia. Mayank Agarwal kept playing for the lifter and was repeatedly squared up. At the other end, Phil Salt hadn't yet come to grips with the skid off the pitch, even off someone like Azmatullah Omarzai, who is strictly in the medium-pace bracket.

The crowd had found its voice, and it felt like the final session of a Test with two new ball bowlers on fire. At that very moment, you couldn't help but wonder what could've been had PBKS showed a bit more restraint while they batted, perhaps "drawn the line a little bit earlier than we did" in Hopes' words. But that passage was all too fleeting, as Salt climbed into the bowling, to wallop his fastest IPL half-century to land the knockout punch.

But as Iyer put it, PBKS "had lost the battle but not the war" as a second chance beckons come Sunday.