Four seamers at the Eden Gardens - missed opportunity or tactical blunder from SRH?

A balmy evening at the Eden Gardens turned into one of hysteria for SunRisers Hyderabad and contrastingly, one of quiet pride for Kolkata Knight Riders when the two teams met in IPL 2024 at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata on March 23, Saturday.

In an innings made up of two halves, SunRisers Hyderabad made one of the biggest tactical blunders seen in recent years in the Indian Premier League. Skipper Pat Cummins, turning out for the first time for his new franchise, called it right at the toss and sent the hosts into bat.

Opting to open the innings with Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Marco Jansen, the visitors came in for some hot and cold treatment from the Knights. While the effervescent Bhuvneshwar put up a rarefied performance with the new ball that belied his years, Jansen came in for some harsh shots expressed by Phil Salt.

However, the innings turned on its head after Cummins came into the attack himself, bringing along Tamil Nadu gunslinger Thangarasu Natarajan.

Leggie Mayank Markande struck as well, and the Knight Riders were reduced to 51-4 in 7.3 overs. In walked Punjab batter Ramandeep Singh - ostensibly to tackle compatriot Markande - who played a blinder of a knock.

Cummins' reluctance to bring left-arm spinner Shahbaz Ahmed into the attack proved to be the visitors' undoing; when the latter did come on in the twelfth over, he conceded fourteen, and lost the confidence of his skipper almost immediately.

Kolkata Knight Riders played just two specialist seamers

SRH skipper Pat Cummins read the conditions wrong at the Eden. [SRH]

In the end, Cummins persisted with Markande and the three seamers alongside him, only to give momentum as an early Holi gift to Rinku Singh and Andre Russell, Ramandeep's successors, who matched beat-for-beat everything that the partisan crowd at the Eden demanded of them.

Unbeknown to Cummins, the game was lost by the end of the first twenty overs owing to the impetus he conceded to the hosts with his fanciful ploy of playing four seamers.

The Knight Riders, possessing better knowledge of the conditions than Cummins, played just Mitchell Starc and Harshit Rana as fast bowlers, with Russell rolling his arms over almost as an addendum.

In the end, the hosts came close enough, and the story of this game - and indeed this essay - would have been different had Jansen and Cummins had enough time to hit one ball out of the park.

Mayank Agarwal (32) and Abhishek Sharma (32) got the visitors off to a good start, only to be reinforced by the ever-consistent Heinrich Klaasen's top-notch counter-attack (63).

However, had Cummins and head coach Daniel Vettori read the conditions better - when was the last time we saw four seamers being played at the Eden? The story of this night may have been different for the Orange Army, deprived of success away from home as they already have been over the years.