Rising Pune Super Giants need to avoid orthodoxy from Top Order

The Rising Pune Super Giants probably had a little too much of orthodoxy in their top order in this year’s IPL which might have harmed them.

If you look at their opening pair and then, number three and number four in the first half of the tournament, they were all orthodox players.

In the shortest format, sometimes, when you are chasing down a big total or even playing at places where the par scores happen to be pretty high, say in excess of 180-200, you need to score at much higher than a run a ball from start to end.

However, when you go with technical batsmen, they don’t play the boundary shots as often as they should because they over-emphasize on the correctness of the batting.

They don’t even think about the cross batted hoicks and swipes which, from the test Cricket’s point of view, is a very good batting quality, but, in T20 or 50-over Cricket, not so much because in those formats it’s important for you to come up with those shots every once in a while.

With Pune, there was always a lull in their innings in between 6 to 15 overs with the fours and sixes hardly making any appearance and the 15-20 runs that they were scoring lesser in that period were making them lose games as it was only that much of margin that they were losing.

Had there been an impact batsman batting maybe at three or four, even though he was not so technical, it could have been ideal and the captain and the coach figured it out later on and changed the combination.

But, at that stage, a lot of games were already lost and the route to playoffs was almost blocked. However, it’s a lesson for them for the next season that there must be a big hitter in top 4.