Royal Challengers successfully defend paltry 157 against Daredevils

Match report

For the neutral, the clash between Royal Challengers and Daredevils was a great one to watch, purely because this match ebbed and flowed really well and went down to the wire, with the visitors needing 19 runs off the final over. Not insurmountable, mind you, at one of the high-scoring venues in India and where defending totals is harder than most others in the country.

On strike was the bereaved Rishabh Pant, having held the Delhi innings together and had very little support from his batting partners. Shane Watson threw the ball to Pawan Negi, a left-arm orthodox spinner who hadn’t bowled until the last over the match, and offered Delhi not just a ray of hope but a proper chance. Pant, with the ball spinning into him, was going to be hard to stop.

Unfortunately for Pant, the size of the task got the better of him and you couldn’t blame him for trying to sweep Negi and getting bowled round his legs. The 19-year-old had singlehandedly held the Delhi innings together and even an experienced player as Amit Mishra didn’t help Pant by not batting sensibly with the gap between runs required and balls left widening all the time.

Needing just 158 for victory, Daredevils’s young guns (Karun Nair, Sanju Samson and Sam Billings at the top) naively threw their wickets away and you have to say, let their team down. They didn’t have to play expansive strokes and for someone like Samson, this could have been a night on which he came of age. Daredevils, as a team, will now be rueing a lost opportunity to begin their IPL 2017 campaign on a winning note and set the tone for the rest of this season.

Like Pant was for Daredevils, Kedar Jadhav put up a T20 batting masterclass and had threatened to drag his team to a bigger total than what RCB eventually ended up with (157/8).

Royal Challengers were 74/3 at the end of 12 overs. But, as is the case in T20s, one over can turn a match on its head and that’s precisely what happened here. Jadhav has been in great form over the last few months, something which he admitted himself during the mid-innings break, and when you are in good form, you strike the ball well, you are confident in your approach and pressure doesn’t always hold you back.

Mishra was bowling flat and tried to deny Jadhav the time to dance down the wicket. But the Haryana leg-spinner bowling flat and not looking to turn the ball meant that the Maharashtra batsman could pick his spot. Jadhav has a wide array of shots which allows him to collect runs all round the dial. Here, though, he looked to hit straight and delivered lethal blows.

A couple of sixes over long on, a flat-batted slap for a four past long off, a chip down the ground for another four, and a couple of twos brought 24 runs off the 13th over. Not often in IPL and T20 cricket, has Mishra been given this treatment, but Jadhav, with the nous of playing spin and by striking the ball sweetly, dominated the senior spinner.

The Challengers now had the momentum and Jadhav, with Stuart Binny playing the ideal foil, was unstoppable.

Carlos Brathwaite bowled the next over and his gentle seamers were bread and butter for Jadhav. This time, the spots were extra cover and mid-wicket. And boy, the inside-out shot Jadhav played to a ball that was angled into his pads and ended up well outside his leg stump, was a thing of beauty. Because Jadhav had moved outside his leg stump to give himself room to free his arms and then Brathwaite seemed to have tucked him up by angling the ball into Jadhav’s pads, this was a particularly difficult shot to execute. But the right-hander, with no second thoughts, took on the West Indian and timed the ball to perfection. Oh, Jadhav must have derived plenty of confidence and satisfaction from this stroke… for that’s how good it was!

Jadhav wasn’t done even now and he played a couple of big strokes to get RCB to 134/4 at the end of 16 overs. He perished in the 17th over, trying to hit Zaheer Khan down the ground and failing to get the distance.

Jadhav and Pant (57) received very little support from the other batsmen and with his 69, you must say that Jadhav made the vital difference for RCB in the overall equation. The tale of the 5th match of IPL 2017 has to be about Jadhav’s clean hitting and Pant’s pluck in the time of adversity. Jadhav was right to be awarded the man-of-the-match.

With the ball, Chris Morris, Shahbaz Nadeem and Yuzvendra Chahal were the standout bowlers. Again, at a venue where spinners might feel insecure, the spells of Nadeem (1/13 in four overs) and Chahal (1/19 in four overs) are a reminder that playing conditions do not always dictate a spinner’s success. Morris (3/21 in four overs) bowled a lethal spell of pace bowling and at the death, found the blockhole consistently to keep the batsmen on a tight leash.

Match facts

IPL 2017, 5th match: Royal Challengers (RCB) vs Delhi Daredevils (DD)
Date and time: April 8, 8:00 PM
Venue: M Chinnaswamy Stadium

RCB vs DD, 5th Match Scorecard

Shane Watson won the toss and chose to bat first.

Playing XIs

RCB: 1. Shane Watson*, 2. Chris Gayle, 3. Mandeep Singh, 4. Billy Stanlake, 5. Kedar Jadhav, 6. Stuart Binny, 7. Pawan Negi, 8. Vishnu Vinod (WK), 9. Iqbal Abdulla, 10. Yuzvendra Chahal, and 11. Tymal Mills

DD: 1. Zaheer Khan (C), 2. Aditya Tare, 3. Sam Billings, 4. Sanju Samson, 5. Karun Nair, 6. Pat Cummins, 7. Rishabh Pant (WK), 8. Chris Morris, 9. Amit Mishra, 10. Shahbaz Nadeem, and 11. Carlos Brathwaite

Scores

RCB: 157/8 (Jadhav 69; Morris 3/21)
DD: 142/9 (Pant 57; Negi 2/3 and Stanlake 2/29)

Result: RCB beat Daredevils by 15 runs to register their first win of IPL 2017. Kedar Jadhav was the man-of-the-match for his exceptional 37-ball 69 (5×4 and 5×6), which propelled his team’s total past 150