Even before he faced his first ball on Friday night, Priyam Garg looked very embarrassed. At the fall of Captain David Warner’s wicket, the baby met teen from Meerut had only just made his way to the middle of the Dubai field a ball ago and relaxed into his spot at the end of the non-striker.
From there, in the hope of holding the strike at the end of the 11th over, he watched batsman Kane Williamson nudge the ball to square-leg.
But only Williamson left Garg stuck halfway down the pitch and suddenly turned pink when he was stared down by the Kiwi.
At this point, not much was going Hyderabad’s way- Warner and Williamson’s successive-ball dismissals had left them reeling at 69/4 with only nine overs to go. And there was not much going young Garg’s way either.
The Under-19 player had little to no match practice in addition to running out of Hyderabad’s middle-order mainstay for 9.
Garg had only played one match since the end of India’s U19 World Cup campaign in February, his IPL start a fortnight ago, where he scored 12.
It did not seem like Garg was going to lead SRH’s revival for the first eight balls of his innings-some singles here, some misses there. But then Sam Curran, the 17th, came over, and Garg proved just why he was among the most promising prospect in the country.
His first boundary gave him a square-drive through the backward stage. Unlike the next shot, where he made space to collar a full-toss behind point for four more, it was a classical move.
The free-hit ball from Curran was as good as a delivery might be, sharp and escorting into the batsman. Yet, for six, it was put over a straight leg.
He raced to his maiden IPL fifty in that manner, the top-score of the innings by a reasonable mile. And after Williamson’s run-out, SRH had conjured up 95 runs in 9 overs, and 164 in all.
This season, given CSK ‘s form, those runs were already going to keep the frontline bowlers of Hyderabad interested.
After the finale of the previous IPL, MS Dhoni has not had the best of times, professionally. There was the ordinary campaign for the World Cup, preceded by an extended absence leave, one interrupted by his retirement from international cricket.
Then there was the beginning of this edition of the IPL, which saw CSK start and finish the game at the bottom of the table on Friday.
He walked in at the fall of the wicket of Faf du Plessis (caused by a run-out of Garg), with CSK at the end of 6 overs trailing at 36/3. Four overs later, at the halfway point, Dhoni and CSK had crept to 44/4.
It took a lot of luck from there on (such as Bhuvneshwar Kumar walking up injured in the final over) and Ravindra Jadeja’s madness for Dhoni’s side to lose by just seven runs.
