28 March (Punjab Khabarnama) : How long is it going to take before a team touches the 300-run mark in the Indian Premier League ? That’s the question intriguing the mind of an average cricket fan at present, following the Hyderabad-Mumbai encounter on Wednesday night.
Hyderabad, powered by Abhishek Sharma, Travis Head and Heinrich Klassen, reached a humongous 277/3 after being put into bat. If Aiden Markram, 42* off 28 balls, had batted in the same vein as the trio above, Hyderabad on Wednesday itself might have become the first team in the IPL to breach the 300-run mark. The previous IPL highest of 263/5 came more than a decade ago when Chris Gayle, in Royal Challengers Bangalore colours, beat the living daylights out of Pune Warriors by scoring 175* off 66 balls.
Last season Lucknow Super Giants posted 257 against Punjab Kings which is now the third highest in the history of the league that started in 2008. As far as franchise T20 cricket is concerned, the previous highest score of 273/2 in the Big Bash in 2022 was surpassed too on Wednesday night.
The 2023 IPL edition was particularly interesting because as many as 37 times the teams reached or crossed the 200-mark in a season. A record! The 200-run mark is pretty common nowadays, but it still takes some doing to get there. The consistency with which the 200-mark was breached… it was a sign of things to come, to be sure.
Batting has evolved over the years and the introduction of T20s played a major role in it. Then the format has seen evolution itself. It’s been awfully infectious, so much so that even Test cricket has not escaped, for its own good though. The Bazball approach has been derived from T20s. In the recent India and England Test series, some Indian batters, particularly Yashasvi Jaiswal, who scored two quick double hundreds, were highly aggressive.
In all fairness, the bowers are at their wits’ end and particularly unadvantageous in the shortest format of the game. The pitches are getting flatter and flatter by the day. The boundaries are getting shorter and shorter. Then the bat has seen the biggest evolution, so much so that even edges comfortably fly over the boundary. And it has encouraged batsmen to play outlandish, novel shots all over the ground and with a lot of success. Ramp shots on both sides of the wicket, no-look shots, helicopter shots, and so many other bizarre shots have now become an integral part of the game.
The Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Hyderabad appears to be a batting paradise. Fans will remember the 2023 World Cup match between Pakistan and Sri Lanka here. The Lankans posted a massive 344/9 which was chased down in 48.2 overs without much fuss by a team that traditionally doesn’t do well while chasing a target. In the match before, New Zealand too had posted an impressive 322/7 against the Netherlands.
The bowlers look totally helpless. The Mumbai bowling unit that conceded 277 wasn’t some ordinary bowling unit. It was spearheaded by Jasprit Bumrah who is one of the best pacers in the world, if not the best. Captain Hardik Pandya is himself a very capable bowler and quite often influences the outcome of a game with his bowling. South African Gerald Coetzee impressed one and all with his grit and pace in the 2023 World Cup, but he looked absolutely clueless yesterday. Kwena Maphaka, under-19 star for South Africa at the World Cup earlier this year, who had hoped to be better than Bumrah after taking a five-for in one of the matches, had a baptism by fire by conceding 66 runs in his four overs in what was his first game in the league.
Mumbai in their turn too posted a massive score (246/5). All these things point to one thing. That it wouldn’t be long before the Indian high-profile league sees the 300-mark breached. Such scores while excite spectators at the stadium and viewers who are watching the action on TV, it’s carnage for bowlers who don’t know where to turn when they face such assaults. But that’s how it is nowadays. They appear to have reconciled to it.