Mental strength makes Chennai favourites to win IPL

After a long league phase that keeps giving teams second chances come the knockout stage of the IPL.

Suddenly players who play ‘no fear’ cricket are thinking different, that little instinctive thought -- what if I get this wrong -- seeps in, they think of the fallout, and that makes all the difference. That swing over midwicket gets a little tentative and you hole out on the boundary. In the league stage, that ball would disappear in the stands.

We have had two below par scores in the two playoffs, perhaps for this reason.

SRH’s batting, which is their Achilles heel, let them down in the first playoff at the Wankhede Stadium. CSK should have chased that score of 139 down comfortably but they surprisingly too made heavy weather of it.

Thankfully, CSK had Faf Du Plessis, not your ideal big hitting T20 game changer but an established international batsman in all formats, so his temperament came to the fore. Faf kept his nerves and wits under pressure and took CSK home.

CSK have always had a fair number of temperamentally strong players, led by the best in this regard. No wonder they have such a great record in the IPLs.

They are my favourites to win the IPL only for this reason, because temperamentally it’s the best of the three teams that are in contention.

When the scores are in the region of 150 or 160, it’s not anymore about power, it’s about being sensible and curbing that desire of trying to hit the ball out of the ground in desperation, it’s about weathering the storm.

In the second playoff at Eden Gardens between KKR and RR, weather brought in a completely new dimension to the game.

The pitch wasn’t ideal and now batsmen had to deal with a bit of seam and sluggishness in the surface, hitting through the line powerfully was an option that was guaranteed to fail. Four batsmen were out caught and bowled in this game. Suddenly in this power game, the need of the hour became subtlety, and I was impressed with the way Shubman Gill and Dinesh Karthik showed this quality before Andre Russell’s power sealed the game for KKR.

In the run chase, the man who was expected to do a Faf for RR was Ajinkya Rahane, but unfortunately he is not the player he was two years back.

So it was not to be for Rajasthan but RR should be proud of themselves they punched above their weight right through the IPL and that should count for something.