In the face of adversity, the meek surrender. The brave, of course, stay calm and collected. But the mad? What do they do? How do they cope with nerve-shredding pressure? Well, maybe, they laugh.
As the Indian Premier League’s maiden final entered its soul-crushing last over, that is incredibly and precisely what Shane Warne and Sohail Tanvir did. After each delivery, as the world watched breathlessly, they converged in the middle and laughed like little boys.
Was it a sign of cool-confidence? Were they so sure that the last few runs would jump into their bags? Or were they simply hiding their true feelings, the naked fear deep within, to deflect the pressure right back on to Team Chennai?
The odds and half a billion people were, of course, with Team Jaipur: after all, they needed just eight in that killing over and still had three wickets in the dugout. But then, Warne hadn’t come so far riding on good wishes or blessings.
He still had a delightful little plan up his sleeve. As Balaji went up to his mark to bowl the last delivery, he took guard about two metres behind the umpire; as the bowler came charging in towards the stumps, Warne too took off. At full speed.
For just that split second, Balaji must have been distracted, if not stunned; as luck would have it, the ball dropped short and Tanvir easily clipped him for the winning boundary. Was that the tubby con artist’s last trick? His last laugh?
The truth is as much as it was a battle of nerves; it was also a war of wits out there. A guerrilla warfare really. Between two wily captains who can probably count their thoughts even in the middle total chaos or utter destruction.
Neither Warne nor Dhoni broke into cold sweat as the match teased one or the other.
Dhoni, paying due respect to the occasion, preferred to play it safe. His only mistake was to hold back Badrinath and send Kapugedera up the order. It probably cost his team a handful of runs, the difference between Rs 4.8 crore and the runners-up tag.
His joker in the pack, while defending 163, was Muralitharan. The prodigious off-spinner elicited a skier off Yusuf Pathan but Suresh Raina couldn’t cling on to the trophy. A few sixers later, the game had slipped over to the other side.
But Dhoni didn’t buckle down. He kept the match alive until the very end by even giving the dangerous Makhaya Ntini the penultimate over. That obviously meant the last over had to be bowled by Balaji. Even Joginder Sharma could not have pulled it off for a third straight time.
Warne’s biggest mistake was sending Niraj Patel as opener. His plan clearly was to continue with a left-right pair to unsettle the bowlers; it just didn’t work thit time. Niraj was wasted at the top and it made Jaipur’s task that much tougher.
While bowling, though, Warne had come up with a new strategy. After sensing that the track was slow, he withdrew Sohail Tanvir after just one eventless, and thereby scary, over. Tanvir was re-introduced in the 16th over and he bowled at the death with the calm of an executioner.
With Shane Watson too bowling the 17th and 19th over, they conceded only 46 in the last five overs. It was easily the most decisive phase of the Chennai innings, and Jaipur had won a key battle by sheer gumption and bravado; after that it wasn’t too difficult to win the war.
Source: The Times of India, Mumbai, 3rd June 2008
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