Thursday 19 / September / 2024
At the start of the Indian Premier League 2016 Rising Pune Supergiants’ skipper MS Dhoni had more resources at his disposal than he could comfortably handle. Having guys like Faf du Plessis, Kevin Pietersen, Steve Smith — three captains — and Mitchell Marsh, an Australian all-rounder — at your service was a blessing unmasked, or so it looked like, but we realized later that it wasn’t really so when Pietersen limped out of the IPL season with a calf issue and Dhoni spoke of a blessing in disguise. Now, as Smith joins KP, Du Plessis and Marsh on the list of players Pune have lost for the reminder of the season due to injury, Dhoni may be worried not about dropping a mate but about finding eleven guys who could pull the team out of the mire.
After the Sunday’s match against the Mumbai Indians, the Supergiants are one of the three teams that have played eight or more games, but Dhoni’s boys are sitting uncomfortably at the bottom half of the table, having just four points. The Gujarat Lions top the table with 12 points from eight matches, followed by the Mumbai Indians with 10 from nine games. The two teams placed below the RPS too have four points, but they have played fewer matches. The Royal Challengers Bangalore have played six and the Kings XI Punjab seven—so Dhoni will have nothing much to cheer himself looking up or down. Time for Dhoni to look straightforward.
With the exit of Du Plessis, the Pune franchise have lost their opening round firepower. Saurabh Tiwary failed in his first outing, against the Gujarat Lions, and he flopped again in his second, against the Mumbai Indians, on May 1, though his personal score of 57 might tell us a different story.
Tiwary was looking good in the early part of his innings when he was in the company of Steve Smith, but after Smith’s dismissal in the 10th over, his scoring rate came down as he struggled for timing and apparently lacked the power to send the ball beyond the boundary. When Smith was out, Tiwary was on 38 off 27 balls, with three fours and two sixes, and when he walked back to the dressing room after getting dismissed in the 18th over, he could add just one more big hit, a boundary in the 11th over. That’s not the sort of stuff you need from an opener.
Pune’s is the sort of problem normally faced by a team that fail to click as a unit. When their openers gave the team a good start, as in most of the games when Du Plessis was playing — their middle-order failed to take the total to an imposing level, and when the openers failed the finishers came in early and engaged themselves in partnership-building to stitch together a total close to the 150-mark. In the rare instance of the openers and the finishers firing in sync, the bowlers misfired— Dhoni’s guys couldn’t defend even a score of 195 in their seventh game, against the Gujarat Lions.
The season is just past the half-way stage, and most teams have played either seven matches, or a game more or less, so there’s plenty of time left to catch up and rise to be one of the top four teams. With a guy like Dhoni as skipper, the franchise owners or the coach need not worry about the leader of the pack, like Punjab did, whose coach Sanjay Bangar had to do the unpleasant job of telling David Miller the bad news that the team required a new man at the helm to boost their fortunes.
Pune have already signed up Usman Khawaja. The big-hitting Australian’s presence at the crease could give the Supergiants a new direction and an exciting dimension to the order of things at the start of the innings. The aggressive left-hander had shown what he could do in the opening powerplay overs in the World T20 Championship.
Obviously, Indian cricket fans weren’t particularly cheering for Khawaja when he demolished Ashish Nehra, Jasprit Bumrah and Ravichandran Ashwin that rocketed Australia to 53 in the first four overs, but his IPL avatar could offer them an exciting opportunity to keep aside national divides and franchise loyalties.
The IPL is actually about celebrations of such unbelievable, uncomplicated opportunities.
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The writer is a freelance contributor based in India. All the views and opinions expressed in the article are solely those of the author and do not reflect those of Times of Oman
