Jadeja stars with bat and ball as CSK climb to third

The recovery

The thing with defending small totals is everybody has to be perfect. CSK had one bowler who was nailing his lengths. Constantly looking to hit the deck, which is where all the vagaries were coming from, whether it was extra bounce, or the ball holding up, or keeping low. Deshpande’s upright seam position also helped him get sideways movement. The Rossow ball nipped in against the angle and left his stumps splayed before he could even react. Beaten for both pace and movement.

But overs five, six and seven cost CSK as Shashank Singh and Prabhsimran Singh went on the offensive. They were pulling off jaw-dropping shots. A ramp over third man for six when there was no room and the ball was climbing. An inside-out drive over cover for four when the ball was darted in on or even outside leg stump.

The collapse

Mitchell Santner has a history of putting in high-impact performances. In his second game for CSK, he hit the last ball for six to win the game. But being a left-arm spinner in a team that already has Jadeja, he tends to ride the bench. This was his 16th game for CSK in five years. He only came in because Mustafizur Rahman had to leave early and Pathirana and Chahar were injured. Still, he is a player who knows his strengths and he backed them, bowling nice and tight on the stumps and asking the batters to hit him to the longer boundary, down the ground. That’s how he got Shashank.

In the next, the ninth over, Jadeja took out Prabhsimran. In the next over, Simarjeet Singh got rid of Jitesh Sharma and so on and so on. Five wickets. Sixteen runs. Twenty-eight balls. PBKS kept trying to hit themselves out of trouble. They were unable to soak the pressure; unable to bat at a different gear.

This is the kind of situation that CSK thrive in. So even when there came a point where Ashutosh Sharma was dropped very poorly by Moeen Ali, they had Jadeja up their sleeve and he produced a wicket off the very next ball, Sam Curran falling to another big shot, and then in the same over, Ashutosh too succumbing to a wild swing. That was 78 for 7 and that was the game.