Yuzvendra Chahal was a vital cog for guiding Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) to their Indian Premier League (IPL) 2020 opening match against Sunrisers Hyderabad on Monday. He has revealed that AB de Villiers and Virat Kohli advised him to bowl googly during his match-turning over which worked for him.
When it was looking SRH has a game in their hand, street-smart Yuzvendra Chahal, in the 12th over of the match, trapped Manish Pandey, who scored 34 off 33 balls. In his last over of four over quota, the spinner bowled out danger man Jonny Bairstow and then got the wicket of Vijay Shankar. He dismantled the crux of SRH’s batting line up and brought the Challengers back in the game. For his masterpiece, he was adjudged Man of the Match as the lanky spinner returned with the figure of 4-0-18-3.
Yuzvendra Chahal on his game plan against SRH:
After the end of the game, Yuzvendra Chahal spoke about his game plan during the crunch situation. He built the pressure on SRH by not leaking runs which forced Manish Pandey to go for a big hit and eventually, he gave an easy catch to Navdeep Saini. For getting the priced wicket of Bairstow, Chahal tricked him with his fuller and as a result, the ball took the bails off.
To get the consecutive wicket of Vijay Shankar, Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers advised the leg spinner to bowl the wrong’un. Eventually, the allrounder could not read the bowl and gave his wicket without scoring a run.
“When I bowled my first over, I realized I need to bowl stump-to-stump line and backed myself. At one point they were batting well and I was trying to bowl loopy ones and wide of the reach which helped in building pressure,” Yuzvendra Chahal explained.
“When I bowled to Pandey I was trying to outside off-stump with that field, but decided to bowl within the stumps because it is difficult to hit through the leg-side and and with Bairstow I bowled little fuller and outside leg so that it becomes tough for him to target the leg-side with the turn away.
“When Vijay came Virat and AB told me to go for a googly and it worked. I put some mud on my hands to make sure there is no dew,” he concluded.
RCB won the match by 10 runs while the Hyderabad’s middle-order problem was again exposed. Notably, in the previous three editions, RCB had lost their opening match but they have started this season with the victory.