One of the biggest charms of the IPL in most seasons is the home advantage that teams enjoy for half the number of total league matches that they play.
Squads are structured keeping in mind the nature of the track that is typical to the home ground for each team.
But this season, with no team playing any match at their home ground, that advantage no longer holds good. Some might argue that even in the last season, no team had the home advantage since all matches were played in the UAE. The difference between last season and the current one is that the variation in the nature of surfaces being played upon is a lot more this time.
A case to point–the pitches tend to play low and slow at the MA Chidambaram Stadium and the Eden Gardens, especially as the summer progresses and the wear and tear of regular matches affects the pace and bounce of the surface. The nature of the pitch at Wankhede in Mumbai and the Chinnaswamy Stadium at Bengaluru is quite different from the ones in Chennai and Kolkata. The pitch at Bengaluru, for that matter, tends to be a batsman’s delight, while the Wankhede wicket does provide some bounce and carry for the seam bowlers and also keep the attacking batsman interested.
How often in the past have we seen teams like CSK and KKR pack the squad with quality spinners who can bowl a tight wicket to wicket line and seamers who have the ability to bowl slower deliveries and cutters and take the pace off the ball. Similarly, teams like MI and RCB tend to pack their batting lineup with players who like playing their shots on the rise and like the ball coming onto the bat.
You would expect top players across teams to adapt quickly to varying conditions, but it’s not always that easy. Which is why you need variety in the squad—players with different skill sets that give the team management the options to pick the right XI to ensure the team balance given the venue they are playing at.
Teams with options of quality spinners and genuine quicks have been able to adjust their Playing XI composition according to the venues and reaped rewards. The same applies to teams with a healthy mix of stroke-makers and players used to scoring runs on low and slow pitches as well.
Take the example of Delhi Capitals, who used Amit Mishra to great effect in Chennai where he claimed a 4 for 24 versus Mumbai Indians, while in the previous match at Wankhede they utilized the services of the left arm seamer Lukman Meriwala against Punjab Kings.
While on MI, the middle order batsmen like Kieron Pollard and Hardik Pandya like to have pace on the ball and like hitting their shots through the line and on the rise as well. With the team not playing any match at Wankhede and in-fact start the season by playing contests on the slower surfaces in Chennai, one can clearly see that runs aren’t flowing from their blade. Infact, as soon as the new ball loses its shine and starts getting a little softer after about 10-12 overs, scoring runs at a brisk clip has been a challenge even for set batsmen.
The numbers bear this out. Generally one expects that the batting team to score more in the latter half of the innings in a T20 game, if they get a solid start and have wickets in hand for the last 10. But in the four matches that MI have played at Chennai, despite having always batted first in all contests and getting the best use of the surface at Chennai, they have scored more runs in the first 10 overs of the innings as compared to the last 10. The only exception was the game against SRH, where they scored 75 in the first 10 overs and an equal number of runs in the last 10 as well.
But Pollard and Pandya are irreplaceable players, and one would expect them to adapt soon and definitely expect a different performance with the bat from them when MI play at Bengaluru later in the season.
Another team to have struggled with getting the composition of their Playing XI right in the initial stages of the tournament is SRH, but more on that in another article.
The writer is a cricket commentator and sports broadcaster who has worked on assignments for leading sports networks in India and abroad.
