The limitations are within the batsmen, not the pitch or bowlers

So how old is old? This was supposed to be a young man's game but look at who is turning it on at the ipl? Warne, murali and kumble, hayden, gilchrist, dravid, ganguly and gibbs. And of course sachin and jayasuriya. What an exhibition....just to show that while you can have sehwag and gambhir, gilchrist and gibbs, you can never keep the legends down. Tendulkar's "reverse paddle" (look how we struggle to give names to some of his shots!) was the one that most people were enamoured by but my favourite was the pull shot over mid-wicket. That is the tendulkar that so many of us were in awe of and to me it was just a statement. Will the ipl allow us to see that side of tendulkar again? Like rediscovering an old melody without it being touched by the remix agents!!

Both the deccan chargers and the Mumbai Indians have learnt that they need to stay ahead of the mid-innings slump that appears around overs 10-16. Mumbai Indians lost out there against the deccan chargers and clearly that was the plan against the knight riders. It’s an interesting phenomenon, this slump, because i am not sure we saw it during ipl1. One explanation, and a good one, is that it is the less experienced players who might be coming in at that time and who have been unable to adjust to the conditions; or that with teams believing that 160 is enough, they suddenly press the safety button and see the asking rate go up.

The key to avoiding that is to get off to a great start and i suspect we will see more of that as we go along. That, and the new ploy that the Mumbai Indians unveiled, off popping in a pinch hitter in the middle overs. i won’t be surprised if we see more of that and the batsmen then realise that the limitations were within them, not the pitch or the bowlers.

The ipl now starts to move north to Pretoria and Johannesburg and i suspect we might start seeing slightly bigger scores there.