Hazlewood dismissed Tripathi and Gaikwad in his opening over. ©BCCI/IPL It was a day of the absurd at Chepauk. Virat Kohli batted 30 balls and timed about five of them. MS Dhoni walked out to bat at No. 9, behind Ravichandran Ashwin, whose dismissal was weirdly cheered on by both sets of fans. And CSK lost to RCB at home after 6,155 days. Perhaps the strangest moment of all came after the game, in a terse press conference with the usually unflappable Stephen Fleming. In a brief and snappy exchange, the Chennai Super Kings head coach allowed himself a window of candour, admitting that he and his team hadn’t been able to read pitches at home for a couple of years. How would RCB handle CSK’s spin trio? That question dominated the buildup to the game, and for good reason. In the season opener here, CSK’s spinners had combined for 5 for 70 from 11 overs. RCB, historically built for truer surfaces, seemed vulnerable. But on Friday, the contest shifted one pitch to the right, and the script flipped completely. The real question became: could CSK handle RCB’s seamers? They couldn’t. Josh Hazlewood and Bhuvneshwar Kumar combined to take 4 for 41 from 7 overs, setting the tone for what would become CSK’s biggest home defeat (by runs). It is easy to pigeonhole Hazlewood as a red-ball specialist. His bowling is built on precision – hitting the channel, landing it on a back of a length from a high release point and extracting movement off the surface. All of those attributes also make him a vital asset in at least two phases of the modern T20 game. Interestingly, it was in the yellow of CSK that his T20 reinvention gathered steam, back in 2020-21. In 2022, he moved to RCB and took 20 wickets from 12 games, seven of them in the PowerPlay, a phase in which he gave away just 6.54 runs per over. Injury setbacks kept him out for most of the last two seasons, but RCB’s faith in him never wavered. That they were willing to spend INR 12.5 crore to bring back a bowler with a worrying recent record of injuries spoke volumes about his value. RCB also forked out INR 10.75 crore to get Bhuvneshwar, and the investments made complete sense. Not only were they adding much-needed experience to their bowling ranks, they were also trying to address a key pain point from the previous year. Statistically, Bhuvneshwar is the greatest PowerPlay bowler in IPL history. He has the most wickets (73) in the phase, and over a 14-year career, he has conceded runs at an economy of just 6.39 while delivering a staggering 56% dot balls. As good as RCB were across different metrics last year, PowerPlay bowling remained a glaring weakness. Their fast bowlers took the fewest wickets (15), had the worst bowling average (45.46), and their economy in the phase (9.34) was kept off the bottom only by Gujarat Titans (9.42). On the day, a fit-again Bhuvneshwar and a refreshed Hazlewood proved more than a handful in conditions that offered a mix of swing, seam, significant bounce, and double-paced variation. CSK’s chase of 196 was smothered before it even had a chance to take off. The secret? Immaculate length control. Not a single delivery was pitched fuller than the six-meter mark, denying the batters any opportunity to step forward and drive. Hazlewood, in particular, repeatedly hit the pitch at the 8-10 metre mark, exploiting the bounce on offer to great effect. In a first over reminiscent of his spell here under the lights in the World Cup opener against India, one that also silenced (briefly on that day) a raucous home crowd, Hazlewood struck twice. For a second game in a row, Rahul Tripathi found himself late on an attempted pull, spooning a simple catch to mid-wicket. Captain Ruturaj Gaikwad fared only marginally better, but with the longer leg-side boundary in play, his mistimed pull was comfortably caught inside the ropes. Bhuvneshwar then toyed with Deepak Hooda before nicking him off with a good length delivery on the off-stump channel. At 26 for 3 inside the PowerPlay, the game was as good as done. Only twice before in IPL history have teams chased 180-plus after being three down for fewer than 30 – LSG at Chinnaswamy in 2023 and Delhi Capitals against LSG just days ago. But where CSK had only Khaleel Ahmed to truly exploit a surface they’d misread, RCB could also call up a third seamer in Yash Dayal, who promptly added two wickets in an over himself to put the game to bed. It was a stunning role reversal in a fixture that has previously played out in an all-too predictable manner. RCB were well prepared, and in Hazlewood and Bhuvneshwar, they were well stocked with the perfect enforcers to execute their plans. In a venue where spin was expected to dominate, it was precision swing and seam bowling that reshaped the contest, turning a question about RCB’s vulnerabilities into one about CSK’s own fading grip on their fortress. ShareTweet
