There is something about speed, isn’t there? Speed thrills but also sometimes kills. Last year, the Sunrisers Hyderabad, with their openers Travis Head and Abhishek Sharma, set up a new template for how to bat in the Powerplay as well as beyond. They batted at breakneck speed, taking the opposition completely by surprise, and as a result, their team came very close to crossing the 300-run mark in the IPL. Their batting was like youngsters in their fancy sports cars going through traffic red lights and not being caught.
This year, in the first match, SRH went through the red light without being caught. But just as the traffic police get smarter and capture those offending cars, so too have the bowlers of IPL teams started to put the brakes on not just SRH but also other teams trying to emulate them. SRH have now, at the time of writing, lost four consecutive matches, where the top three have not made much of a contribution. Bowling slower deliveries and mixing them with the odd one into the ribcage of the batters has resulted in them holing out to the fielder at deep square-leg and being dismissed in the Powerplay itself. The batters will certainly have to find a new way to try and breach the red lights once again.
That said, the 200 mark is being reached quite regularly — thanks mainly to batters going into fifth gear in the last quarter of the innings. As the summer gets hotter and pitches get drier, the spinners will come more into play, and we may not see 200-plus scores as frequently as we have in the first couple of weeks. The first couple of weeks have also shown that there is a big difference between smashing sixes and fours in the State premier league, where the attack is short of national or international class and the boundaries even shorter. In the IPL, with stronger attacks, sharper bowlers, and the use of technology to discern the strengths and weaknesses of the batters, most of the big hitters from the State premier league have hardly troubled the scorers. Likewise, some of the fast bowlers who were bought for crores are proving even more expensive on the field.
In the IPL auction, there is generally a trend to look at one or two international fast bowlers and believe that Indian bowlers who come off a slightly long run-up will be able to do the same. However, these are uncapped players, short on experience, and thus found wanting under the intense pressure of the IPL. Apart from fast bowlers, leg-spinners — both right and left-handed — are the flavour of the IPL, though again, most of them end up not being worth the sums spent on them.
The spate of injuries to India’s budding fast bowlers is a real cause for concern. When you look at the names of those at the NCA in Bengaluru, you get a sense of the hazards of trying to bowl fast. There is a certain commonality to the injuries, which begs the question of whether the gym training they do is suitable for Indian bodies. The one and only Kapil Dev hardly ever went to the gym, yet he bowled hundreds of deliveries in the nets and ran several laps of the ground after net sessions. Apart from a hamstring injury that ended his long career, he had no other injuries despite bowling heaps of overs every day on lifeless surfaces in India. The body science experts at the IPL, who do not want bowlers to bowl more than 20 deliveries in the nets, would have been horrified if they had seen Kapil bowl hundreds of deliveries. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as the old saying goes, and when you compare the career of Kapil with those of India’s current fast bowlers — who bowl only 20-odd deliveries in the nets — it tells you that body science is an individual matter and that every player needs to be treated according to their own strength and endurance.
The recent news that the ECB is going to retire the Pataudi Trophy, given to the winners of the Test series between England and India in England, is disturbing indeed. This is the first time one has heard of a trophy named after individual players being retired, though the decision is entirely the ECB’s, and the BCCI may well have been informed. It shows a total lack of sensitivity to the contribution made by the Pataudis to cricket in both England and India. There may well be a new trophy named after more recent players, and here’s hoping that if an Indian player has been approached, he will have the good sense to politely decline — not only out of respect for two former India captains but also to avoid the same fate of having a trophy named after him retired after he is gone. The ECB is fully entitled to name the trophy after one of their own players, but I, along with loads of Indian cricket supporters, fervently hope that any other Indian cricketer will have the smarts to decline, lest history repeats itself as it has with the Pataudi Trophy.
