Yadav extends
Suryakumar hammers 156 as Mumbai
MUMBAI: Mumbai piled on a mammoth 603 runs in the first innings to leave the Rest of India side gasping on the second day of their Irani Cup encounter at the Brabourne Stadium on Monday.
In return, ROI had managed 36 runs at the end of day’s play after losing Srikar Bharat’s wicket for 16 runs.
Suryakumar Yadav, batting on 88 on Sunday, went on to score 156 before scooping a Jayant Yadav delivery to the bowler. In fact, Mumbai’s top six batsmen all returned with scores of over 50 – an Irani Cup record. Skipper Aditya Tare (65) and Siddhesh Lad (66) also got half centuries to add to the knocks of Yadav, Akhil Herwadkar (90), Jay Bista (104) and Shreyas Iyer (55).
Yadav, who was known for his attacking batting only a few season ago, has focused on playing the anchoring role this season while players like Iyer and Bista have gone after the bowlers. His mature approach has led to good results, with Yadav scoring five half centuries and three centuries in the Ranji Trophy this season – 115 vs Madhya Pradesh in the semis, 104 vs Gujarat and 100 vs Baroda in the group stages. However, Yadav rated the knock against ROI as his best of the season.
“This is my best knock of the season, considering I took the team to a comfortable position in the Irani Cup, which we haven’t won in such a long time.
“There was no pressure on me to perform when I went out to bat, but there was some responsibility on my shoulders. After Shreyas Iyer’s dismissal, I thought that someone should drop the anchor and stay on the crease,” Yadav said after the end of the day’s play.
Yadav added that his team’s approach of slowing down the run rate on Monday was part of their plan to bat on for as long as possible. “Our plan was to just keep batting as long as we can so that we had a comfortable total on board and our bowlers had some cushion,” he said.
Mumbai’s strategy meant ROI’S bowlers toiled with little returns for the majority of the day. They were hampered, in part, by the injury to pacer Ankit Rajpoot, who hurt his left knee while fielding on Sunday and was consequently unable to bowl at all on Monday.
Off spinner Jayant Yadav, picked over Shahbaz Nadeem and Akshay Wakhare, claimed four wickets for 132 runs. But by the time he scalped those wickets the damage was already done as Mumbai had scored 512 runs before Yadav fell. It is a universally accepted prognosis in cricket that the shorter the format, the more difficult it is to predict the result of the match. What this statement implies is that there are no favourites in a T20 match. That was the reason why the experts, who generally go by statistical records and the form book, were extremely reluctant to predict the winner of the Asia Cup final, once the match was reduced to a 15-overs-a-side contest.
Skipper MS Dhoni himself had an enigmatic smile when asked how confident he was of winning after the toss had fallen in his favour. It was clear from what he said that when it is hard to even be too sure of a T20 match outcome, a reduction by five overs each has now made it harder to pick a winner.
This has been the conventional wisdom so far, which even the strongest purveyors of T20 cricket believe in no matter what their public stand may be. Seen in this context, the headlines in most papers to the effect that “Asia Cup today, World Cup tomorrow” may sound an optimistic assertion, that is pandering to the Indian cricket fans’ desire to see their team win the championship.
Can any team be called favourites for the T20 World Cup? Obviously not, though the kind of cricket India have played in the last month or so, first in Australia and now in Bangladesh, does suggest that they would be terribly disappointed if the Championship eludes them. A formidable batting top half and now a pace attack that has so far responded positively to pressure situations has made India look almost invin cible even in this format.
Unlike in Bangladesh where the wickets were seamer friendly India will be playing in far more amiable surroundings and on surfaces where batsmen are the undisputed kings. This would make them even more confident of putting up scores that teams much stronger than what they encountered in the Asia Cup would find difficult to match.
The difficult part would be the seam bowling, which on flat Indian wickets may find the big-hitting Australians, South Africans and New Zealanders hard to contain. In Australia the Indian batsmen showed that if conditions favoured batsmen no score is too big for them to chase. The same would be true for Indian conditions with one big plus being that the spinners could come into play far more than they do outside India. All these point to India being the most favourable candidate to win the championship, a fact that is being acknowledged by other teams as well.
If there are doubts which can’t be banished from the mind, it is the very unpredictable nature of this format, where luck and chance can play a much bigger role in deciding the outcome of a match than in the longer formats