Sunrisers Hyderabad’s bowlers fired in unison as Mumbai, chasing 118, folded for 87 — the lowest score in a completed match this IPL season.
In some ways, Rashid Khan holds out hope for those who wondered what could have happened had Shahid Afridi focused on being a leg-spinner who could bat, rather than the other way around. Rashid grew up watching Afridi bowl a lot on television, and seen through that prism, it’s easy to understand the final product, the version we see right now bowl in the IPL. The build-up, the quick bursting run to the crease, the load-up and even the occasional delivery reminds one of Afridi. And that lovely creative imagination is probably better than that of Afridi, or so it looks as of now. Unlike Afridi, he doesn’t have the arduous task of shoving the people’s favourite big hitter identity to the side, and can focus on being a leg-spinner. There is enough quality for us to follow his career unfold to its full potential.
Rashid has a bewildering array of little variations hidden in that quick-arm release of his. At times, he gets his right arm so close to his head, and twists out that googly. Often, he changes angles in his front-of-the-hand releases that makes the ball gently dink away a little bit. If he can allow his imagination to run unhindered, we could be in for a treat in years to come.
Rashid Khan took two wickets for 11 runs. He also bowled a maiden over.
With 58 runs needed in 50 balls, and when Mumbai was rallying through Krunal Pandya and Keiron Pollard, Khan had a double strike to put Sunrisers Hyderabad on top. He hurried one so quickly through the defences of Pandya, who was caught completely unaware and trapped in front. A over later, he got one to break away in traditional fashion but this was, again, quicker than what Pollard anticipated. The big Trinidadian was on the back foot, waiting to cut it past slip but it was too quick for him to manipulate and tame. Instead, he sent it straight to the slip fielder, and Mumbai’s back was broken.
The joy in watching Rashid bowl lies in his reactions immediately after he has bowled. Leg-spinners are historically expressive characters, never afraid to show the batsmen who was the boss on that delivery, remind them of how they were fooled, but Rashid does it better than most: There is almost a childish glee at times. Like the time he bowled a maiden in the 17th over of the innings, and beat Hardik Pandya with a vicious leg-break that spun past the bat rather quickly. There was this “we know who is the boss here” kind of a grin on his face. If you hunt down his Youtube videos where he is taking bucketful of wickets every other game, you would notice the look of disdain on occasions. As if he is saying to the batsmen, who are usually not that skilled to face his quality, “look, no offence meant, but you shouldn’t be here against me. Go back”.
Batsmen fail to show up
Not that it was just Rashid who did the job for Hyderabad. In what was a generally low-quality batting game from both teams, the kind of game that IPL critics would cue up to expose batsmen fed on flat tracks, nearly all bowlers came to the party. Shakib Al Hasan got Rohit Sharma to edge an intended big hit to slips, Siddarth Kaul winked out three batsmen with his accuracy, and in general it was shambles all around. It was the same theme when Hyderabad batted; not many batsmen coped well. Not a surprise then that Hyderabad scored just 118 but won by 31 runs, and with 14 balls to spare.
Markande’s googly impresses
But Mumbai’s shoddy day with the bat shouldn’t hide the good work of their find of the season so far: Mayank Markande. When he hoodwinked MS Dhoni with a vicious googly on his IPL debut a few days ago, even his coach Mahesh Inder Singh Sodhi wasn’t sure whether it was a planned dismissal. In other words, the man who knows his boy’s inscrutable googly action wanted to know whether he had out-thought Dhoni, or was it just the action that did it? He got his answer in a phone call the next day. “‘Sir, that was planned’, he told me,” and the coach turns indulgent as he says, “The guy who bowlers around the world dread to bowl to, he got him out like that.”
Markande is one of the better IPL stories that summer nights throw up in India every now and then. A man catapulted to national cricketing consciousness by a special dismissal, and then the focus turns to his art. An otherwise insipid Wankhede night where the match in general threw up low-quality cricket, allowed one to focus on Markande’s bowling. Even as Sunil Gavaskar and Sanjay Manjrekar tried their best to find a Marathi or Maharashtrian connection, the boy from Punjab put on a good show.
It was the googly that will now come under greater scrutiny, no doubt. It’s interesting that a ball ripped out of the back of the hand can be so difficult to pick. But unlike traditional googly bowlers, who get that ball to loop out of the hand higher than the traditional legbreaks, Markande rips it almost flat out. In some ways, it’s almost as if he finger-spins it across. The fore finger and the index clutch one side of the seam, and the other two grip the other side, and he whirs it down rather quickly. More often than not, he lands it on the stumps, rather than starting it from outside off. Apparently, accuracy and line of attack are old strengths of his as attested by the likes of Reetinder Singh Sodhi, former India player, who knows him for years.
His sliders should, in theory, be easier to pick with the palm facing the on-side (to a right-hand batsman) but he keeps the batsmen honest in that case as well. Sometimes, he slides them on straight, at times with a closed wrist, he gets those to turn in a bit. All the little tricks, as a totality, have proved enough to bewilder batsmen. Especially, when he has a nice little leg-break as well, where he side-spins it well to break it away.
Courtesy – The Indian Express
