Hello and a warm welcome to the daily match review about every game of this year’s IPL. In this blog, I will write about one of the most insane games ever played in the history of this sport, which was between the Sunrisers Hyderabad and the Mumbai Indians at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium where again the trend continued where the home game once again emerged victorious. But to put all of these aside, the fans did witness a match which maybe comes once in a decade or a century because there were records broken for fun by both teams, especially SRH posting the highest score ever in the IPL, surpassing RCB’s 263. So let’s get started with the review!
Hardik Pandya won the toss and unsurprisingly chose to bowl first but even in his wildest dreams he and his team wouldn’t imagine the carnage they were about to witness. The chase started quickly as Travis Head got his SRH debut but soon after Mayank Agarwal. But with Abhishek Sharma joining Head, the bombardment of that innocent leather ball started where they were hitting sixes for fun, getting the 100 in just 7 overs and hitting 148 in the first 10, and were even looking at 300 at this point. Still, when Travis Head and Abhishek Sharma departed for their bullet-style 63, Aiden Markram and the spin-feaster Heinrich Klassen smoked everything into the stands, breaking RCB’s 263 in the last over but falling 1 run short of the biggest T20 total of 278, but still they posted a mammoth 277/3. At this point, the chasing team would just put their hands up and surrender but not the Mumbai Indians. Ishan Kishan and Rohit Sharma started attacking from ball one and got fifty in just 3 overs. Soon, Kishan and Rohit departed but they did ensure the run rate was in check, so the local boy, Tilak Varma had some time to settle. Then even he started tonking all the balls out the ground, supported by the promising Naman Dhir and from nowhere, MI were 141/2 at the halfway mark, above the required run rate, which just shows the intent of the Mumbai batters. But Naman Dhir fell and soon even Tilak Varma fell right after the break and the innings slowed down, which MI couldn’t afford to do because the run rate was touching 20 an over. Even as Tim David and Shepheard hit some boundaries, 277 was too many for MI as they still fell 31 runs short but they did post 246 in the end, which is also a commendable effort and ensured their NRR doesn’t go off for a toss. But as I said in the beginning, the fans got their money total worth it to watch a game of all the big guns in full form, smoking a total of 38 sixes into the stands and a total of 69 boundaries. More number of records broken in this game are mentioned in this cricbuzz article: Stats Highlights: SRH break 11-year record to post highest IPL total | Cricbuzz.com
But one would imagine that maybe the Eden Gardens, or the Chinnaswamy, or the Wankhede could be the grounds where the record of 263 would be broken but it was surprisingly at Hyderabad. The reasons I can pick for this are some poor bowling by MI, giving just too many balls to hit especially Kwena Maphaka, who just got the player of the series award in the U-19 World Cup recently held in South Africa and made his IPL debut in this game, but yes he still a young champ and sure he will come back. But when SRH hit 277, their eyes would be on an easy 80-100 runs win, boosting their NRR, but allowed even MI to hit 246, which is also a huge total and in fact, MI possibly could chase it down. So the bowling by both teams was under-par but the standout performance for me, which made the difference in the two teams was by captain Pat Cummins, cool as a cucumber picking up 2 wickets below 9 an over but the game-changing over was bowled by Bhuvi, who didn’t pick a wicket and was hit for 53 in his 4 overs which is bad, but the 13th over which he bowled, he conceded just 5 runs, which as cricbuzz mentioned in their commentary, was “gold dust” considering the number of runs and boundaries hit in this game. But MI needed 96 off the last 6 overs, still chasable and even when Tilak Varma got out, Hardik and Tim David could get MI home. But Hardik played a rather slower innings, just 24 of the 20 balls he faced, in a chase where a batter at least needed a strike rate of 180+ and struggled to muscle anything over the fence after initially scoring a four and a six in his first 4 balls. So generally even in a high-scoring chase, say about 180-200, there are just 3 phases in the game, powerplay, middle overs and the death overs. But in this case, these phases are shortened and are just about 3-4 overs and winning almost every phase, if not every phase is necessary to be alive in the chase and MI did dominate a huge amount of the chase, but the overs between the 3rd over and the 6th over, where the 18 balls bowled went for just 26 with the fall of the aggressive Mumbai openers but more importantly the phase, which was between the 12th over and the 16th over, where again just 25 runs in 4 overs were given. In the SRH innings, they dominated every phase and so ended up handing a heavy defeat to MI by 31 runs. I did write this extended paragraph, especially for this match to emphasise how SRH won those small phases of the game, where they didn’t get many wickets but these overs were very economical and these small differences accumulated into a big difference and the result was SRH winning by over 30 runs, but huge credit to the MI batters for hitting 246 in the chase but they will still feel they could have chased it.
So, hope you enjoyed this rather, long review of one of the most incredible games played in the history of the sport as I thought it was necessary to explain these small things which play a huge factor in a game.