Punjab Kings’ Sam Curran says cricket is turning into baseball

Well, has this really helped in watching IPL better? With a section of IPL followers, be it pundits or fans on the street, being vocal that it has become a predictable and boring exercise of swinging the bat at everything – the impact player rule means the batsmen, especially The openers do not shy away from throwing away their wickets to get off to a great start in the powerplay.

What difference does it really make? Curran says: ”There are lots of different things, people can hit balls longer, coaches, training, dew, dot balls go wide after review and you get an extra ball.”

The point was taken along with the great Sunil Gavaskar’s plea for increasing the size of the boundary on the field to give bowlers a better chance of catching the batsmen in the deep. ”Look at this ground today,” Gavaskar said recently in Hyderabad: ”There is enough space to take it back a few metres. This could prove to be the difference between a catch and a sixer.

Improvements in shot-making as well as external factors have made it almost impossible to stop batsmen. Even five years ago, AB de Villiers’ switch hit aimed to destroy the bowler’s line or MS Dhoni’s helicopter shot to neutralize the yorker would have left us in awe, but now a whole range of 360-degree shots have been added to it . ,

However, this is not to absolve bowlers who want to perform well in challenging conditions – last night’s game at Eden is a case in point. Opting to chase, Curran employed four seamers (including himself) during the powerplay against the free-stroking Phil Salt and Sunil Narine, but all proved equally guilty of bowling too much and being wayward – Only lagged behind in the process.

“When you have to chase 200-plus, you have to take risks in the powerplay. (How to deal with such stalking?) Try and hit it as hard as possible (laughs). It was a case of if it’s in your area you go after it. We wanted to lose as few wickets as possible,” said Bairstow, who employed debutant Sri Lankans Dushmantha Chameera and Harshit Rana to set the early pace.

The 93-run partnership between Bairstow and Prabhsimran in the powerplay would have helped instill some confidence in the Punjab camp going forward. They eventually got the better of South Africa’s 259/4 against the West Indies in March last year. In the IPL, Rajasthan Royals recently held the previous record of chasing 224 against KKR at the Eden, equaling the record set against the then Kings XI Punjab in Sharjah in 2020.