What do teams do generally when they play Mumbai Indians on a boundary hitting ground like the Wankhede? Pack the side with bowling options. One look at the CSK XI on Sunday tells you that eight members could bowl. Barring Shardul Thakur, Tushar Deshpande, Matheesha Pathirana, Ravindra Jadeja and Mustafizur Rahman, you also had Daryl Mitchell, Rachin Ravindra, and Shivam Dube. All of them could have bowled an over each.
But despite them being available, they stuck to the five bowler theory to do the job and defend 206 against a powerhouse batting line-up.
Thakur, Mustafizur and Deshpande were tasked with the difficult role of bowling two overs each in the powerplay to allow skipper Ruturaj Gaikwad to use Pathirana with more protection on the boundary and use his x-factor bowler against the big guns of MI like Suryakumar Yadav and Romario Shepherd. It worked like a charm.
CSK also ditched the match-up theory of not bowling left-arm-spin to left-hand batters.
Ravindra Jadeja bowled to both Tilak Varma and Ishan Kishan and despite his third over going for 18, his figures of none for 37 off four were still less than the asking run rate.
The squeeze was applied in the 14th, 15th, and 16th over as a sequence of 15 balls, bowled by the combination of Pathirana, Thakur and Deshpande, produced just five runs, when the asking rate was 11.85. If you see the dot balls bowled by both teams, the difference is not huge. MI bowled 42 scoreless deliveries; CSK bowled 43. But off those 43, 15 off them came in the final eight overs, causing a deceleration of the innings, causing the asking rate to blow out.
