Gujarat Titans 168 for 5 (Sai Sudharsan 61, Washington 50, Hinge 2-17, Sakib 2-37) beat Sunrisers Hyderabad 86 (Cummins 19, Holder 3-20, Rabada 3-28, Prasidh 2-23) by 82 runs
At the toss, GT captain Shubman Gill said that the pitch in Ahmedabad looked like “a better wicket than we have had in the past couple of matches.” He was dismissed in the third over, off a rare mistimed swipe across the line. He had misjudged a pitch that turned out to be one of this IPL’s most treacherous ones: deliveries stuck in the surface, the new ball jagged both ways, and scoring options were hard to find square of the wicket.
GT’s go-slow
Pat Cummins unlocked the secret to bowling on this surface early: he pushed it in on a hard length, and kept swinging the new ball away from both Sudharsan and Gill. But the first two wickets for SRH came from elsewhere. Praful Hinge found himself back in the SRH side, in place of Harsh Dubey to give them an extra pace option.
Hinge mimicked the Cummins line-and-length early on, and tempted Gill into a misjudged on-drive. In the final over of the powerplay, Jos Buttler realised he could not go big in the ‘V’, so he tried to scoop Hinge behind the wicket instead. All he managed was an edge to the keeper.
Hinge’s twin strikes consigned GT to 34 for 2, their lowest powerplay score this season.
Sudharsan, Sindhu mount comeback
If ever there was a pitch suited to Sudharsan’s brand of T20 batting, it was this. He kept pouncing on the deliveries that erroneously landed in the slot, and pushed the others around to turn over the strike. Nishant Sindhu, who made 22 off 14, kept him company at the other end through the middle overs. Sindhu stayed deep in his crease and played drives and cuts, both batters biding their time.
Sensing a breakthrough, Cummins brought himself back into the attack in the 10th over to bowl his third. He rifled in a delivery outside off, full but rearing off the pitch at Sindhu. He could only mistime a lofted drive to long-off.
Cummins ended with figures of 1 for 20 in the 16th. Just an over later, Sai Sudharsan – who had brought up his sixth half-century of the season – opted for another scoop off Sakib Hussain. The full delivery took off the bottom of his bat, and Hinge gobbled it up at short third.
Washington drags GT to 168
Washington starred in the final overs of the GT innings. He jumped on top of deliveries too high for most others to cut, and sent them off to the ropes by rolling his wrists over them late. He saved his best shots for the end of the 19th over, off Eshan Malinga, who had a rare off-day and gave away 46 runs. He fell down on successive deliveries, first scooping a yorker down over short fine, then attacking a full toss by rolling his wrists, once more, for a shovel over deep square leg.
Rabada, Siraj take out SRH top order
At the midway mark, GT’s total was the Schrodinger’s par score – neither quite par but also just, with Sudharsan hesitating to call it enough for their bowlers between innings. Siraj and Rabada then bowled through the powerplay for the fifth match in a row. Nineteen balls into the innings, they had dismissed Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan.
Rabada, in particular, kept hitting the hard length close to 150kph, slanting deliveries away from the left-handers to have Kishan driving at one away from his body, Abhishek chopping one into his stumps, and No. 4 R Smaran mistiming one to Gill in covers. He finished his spell in one go, returning 3 for 28.
Holder and Prasidh finish the job
Holder’s entry to the GT side has given them another tall, accurate bowler to go to in the middle overs. In their previous game, against Rajasthan Royals, he had plucked out the final three wickets in the space of five balls. Here, he took 3 for 20 as he mopped up SRH’s lower order.
The wicket had worn down as the evening went on, so Holder resorted to slower balls in the back-half of the innings. First, he effectively finished the contest by taking out Heinrich Klaasen, who swiped at a ball lacking in pace over his head, to keeper Buttler running to his left. Nitish Kumar Reddy was his next victim, courtesy an edge from the extra bounce Holder kept extracting from the surface, while Shivang Kumar was the final batter to fall off a misadventurous scoop.
Our final tall bowler of the day – in the cohort of Cummins, Holder, Rabada and Siraj – also had the highest release point of all: Prasidh Krishna. He went back-of-a-length in his spell to finish with figures of 2 for 23 of his own.
Abhijato Sensarma is a sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo
