Sunrisers Hyderabad play Chennai Super Kings in Qualifier 1. (Source: PTI)
After sitting out of the IPL for a couple of years, Chennai Super Kings have come straight back and completed their first ritual without a fuss. They’re in the playoffs, and remain the only team that have made it past the league stage every time there’s been an IPL with them in it. While it’s been a comprehensive return to the fold, they have had to constantly contend with barbs over the average age of their roster. And perhaps MS Dhoni summed it up best midway through the tournament when he spoke about how the senior-citizen look of his team wouldn’t have an impact on the present season but there might be a cause for a rethink over the next few years. His pack of veterans have so far held up his word, be it Shane Watson or Harbhajan Singh.
Sunrisers Hyderabad, on the other hand, have been on cruise mode from the start of their campaign and were the first team to qualify, nearly two weeks before the league stage came to an end. The initial phase of their season was based around their prowess in defending low totals – even if at times it wasn’t by choice. They have though, led by Kane Williamson, shown that their batting can match up to their bowling when it comes to match-winning ability as the season has waged on. They’ve chased down significant totals with consummate ease, and came close to overcoming the 219 set by RCB last Thursday. Tuesday will pit two teams, one that came back from serving a two-year ban following a crisis and the other that started the season off with a crisis with their talisman captain being banned, who inevitably looked set to meet in the first qualifier or the first shot at making the final. The upper hand, if any, would be with CSK, simply because they got the better of Sunrisers in both their league matches, though not with any great conviction.
Leading with calm intensity
Williamson and Dhoni are intense men. They might have that veneer of external calm, and may even be renowned for it. But you look into their eyes in the heat of battle – Dhoni’s might blink and animate more than his Kiwi counterpart’s – and it’s evident that they don’t react well to losing. Question marks hung over their leadership credentials at the start of the season – in an IPL context anyway. For all his unprecedented success as CSK’s captain in the past, this was a Dhoni who hadn’t led any team at any level for nearly 14 months – the longest time he’d not been captain in over a decade. Not to forget his own up-and-down form in the months leading up to the tournament. Williamson, who’s led New Zealand with great acclaim, was coming in as a replacement for a man who’d shaped Sunrisers into a winning unit with his gung-ho style of captaincy. Many wondered whether the understated Kiwi could fit into David Warner’s shoes and lead from the front, both as a captain and a batsman. To his credit, Williamson has not just been inspirational on the field, he’s found a new gear to his batting. Not many would have predicted that his overall strike rate – which incredibly stands at 143.07 after having scored a staggering 661 runs – would just be a shade under Chris Gayle’s. Warner really hasn’t been missed. Dhoni, on the other hand, has regained a gear in his batting that seemed to have been lost for good. And he’s hardly taken his foot off the pedal ever since, which has meant that CSK too have not lost any of their dominance of old.
Bulky at the top, brittle in the middle for SRH
While both teams have been heavily dependent on their openers, CSK’s runs have been slightly more spread out than is the case with Hyderabad. Williamson and Dhawan have scored 49.23 of all the runs that their team has scored, which means the rest have hardly come to the party. Manish Pandey, Yusuf Pathan and Shakib Al Hasan have chipped in but not handily enough. Pandey’s unbeaten 62 against RCB was some solace to an otherwise iffy middle order that could well be tested direly in case of a rare failure for Williamson. Suresh Raina has been at his consistent best, even if a little scratchy on occasions, and has ensured that the batting’s in safe hands even when Shane Watson and Ambati Rayudu haven’t fired. Then there’s of course Dhoni.
CSK’s Dance of death
Dhoni’s been left shaking his head more often than he’d like by his death bowlers. Dwayne Bravo has been patchy with the ball, and his bad days have been really bad as his economy of 10.15 would suggest. It’s also rare that he’s still only on 11 wickets at this stage of the competition. Unlike their batting, the onus with CSK’s bowling has been with the new ball, and on Deepak Chahar and now Lungi Ngidi getting them wickets. The spinners have had their days, but they haven’t been consistent enough to win over Dhoni’s confidence. It’s only rarely that they have completed their quota of overs. Sunrisers, not for the first time, lay claim to having the best bowling unit in the league, and their death overs have been in safe hands thanks to the prodigious Rashid Khan and the prolific Siddarth Kaul. Shakib, meanwhile, has played an unsung role in the middle overs to tie opposition batsmen up. And the time is now for Dhoni’s death bowlers to follow suit and ensure that their captain isn’t shaking his head in despair as CSK look to make an early entry into the IPL final on a day the IPL comes to you an hour earlier for the first time in 11 years.