IPL 7: Fairytale finale to preliminaries

Mumbai: This is the stuff of the best sporting tales. An aching suspense as a team chasing a target tries to achieve the impossible, which, because of the power of the modern willow and the propensity of bowlers to wilt, suddenly becomes merely improbable and, soon enough, swims into the region of the possible. In a crackerjack of a weekend, two fantastic run chases, made sharper than the stipulated 20 overs thanks to earlier drift in team performance, restored a lot of the faith that had been lost in IPL-6 thanks to betting and fixing shenanigans.

More than that, it was the Cinderella-like transformation of two underperforming batsmen that decided who would be the two teams to join the Kings XI and the Super Kings in the play-offs.

Yusuf Pathan, whose form seemed to dive in inverse proportion to the money bid on him at the auctions, gained back some of his hard hitting reputation in an unbelievable knock of striking the cover off the white leather ball. Once a $2million batsman, he was retained by the use of the home team card this time and at last repaid the faith reposed in him by the KKR skipper Gautam Gambhir.

Having spent a couple of seasons when he hardly seemed capable of putting bat to ball, Yusuf found the rhythm of the swinging willow in the nick of time as KKR pushed on towards the top of the table in a guts-and-glory show against a sharp target. Pathan’s lusty blows with his heavy bat defied description as a latecomer to the party ended up lighting the fireworks to provide fantastic entertainment.

Similar was the case with Corey Anderson who came into prominence with some lovely strikes against the Indian bowlers in New Zealand. As a Mumbai Indian, he was rarely in form in IPL-7 until the day of the Mission Impossible came up. No one could have timed his return to form better as Anderson swung all the juicy offerings of Rajasthan Royals bowlers to various parts of the Wankhede Stadium.

The success of batsmen against bowlers is a given, especially in T20 cricket in which everything is loaded in favour of the willow against the leather sphere. Even so, some of the bowling by RR was as egregious as schoolboys spraying the ball around in the lunch time match in the school ground. It does make one wonder how anyone who is paid so much can bowl so badly. It appears the full tosses they bowled were in direct proportion to the millions they get to play IPL.

Dew or no dew, RR could have managed the bowling far better than it did. To bowl short and give width or spray that wide half volley in failed yorkers was to give the batsmen far too much room to keep hitting the ball so hard that eleven men seem far too few to defend. Dravid may make the point about his team not having a home ground advantage. That is the luck of the draw and professional bowlers should perform far better than become cannon fodder.

The most deserving four seem to be in the playoffs while RR could be termed the somewhat unlucky one. Teams like the defending champions Mumbai Indians who were written off at the start showed rare spirit to keep fighting to the very end when a calculator gave them a final ray of hope in asking for one last boundary off the next ball just when everything seemed lost.

Those who did not make it to the valuable playoffs have a whole year to ruminate over what went wrong and how to put together a combination that will last the 4-5 weeks of the league well enough to clinch a place in the eliminator at least. The other four can reach for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow on June 1.