Shane Watson, the big-match maniac, hands CSK its third title glory

1. Shane Watson, the big-match maniac, hands CSK its third title glory ‘Cometh the moment, cometh the man!’These words are so true for Shane Watson, the Hulk who tore apart the best bowling side of the tournament to bring to reality the grand homecoming dream which his side and its fans, had in their eyes since it was announced that the most loved (and also the most hated) franchise will be making its return into the IPL arena this season. Watson, who had a kind of hot and cold season this year, delivered when it mattered the most, the big stage finale of the mega showpiece cricketing event. His beast of an innings, which stood at 117 runs off just 57 balls including 11 fours and eight sixes, literally swallowed all the venom that Sunrisers Hyderabad’s bowling unit had in store and made a mockery of their decent first innings total of 178 runs. There is something in the way or culture of the Super Kings camp which helps even the most underperforming players to rise up and take a shot at the eternal glory and this IPL season is full of such stories of rock-solid motivation and team-support which brought out the best from the players like Ravindra Jadeja, Faf du Plessis, Dwayne Bravo, Deepak Chahar and to some extent Shardul Thakur and Shane Watson. Watson, who was ridiculed as a pale shadow of the mighty all-rounder he once was, is a great example of how well the player management system operates in the franchise. Stephen Fleming, the head coach of the franchise, spilled some beans about the brilliant man-management of the team, “It’s just putting a lot of pieces together. It’s a lot of respect, it’s the way we treat our players. And a lot of communication as well. It is not rocket science, but looking after little things and making sure that every player in the squad is clear on where they are going for the two months.”

2. Fleming was bang on in his assessment because you don’t really need to do a lot of work with big players like Watson. They just require a strong mental conditioning to remain in their groove and that comes by explaining clearly the roles expected of them and backing their games and instincts to win matches for the team. This strong mental base was visible in the finale where Watson played out ten balls upfront without taking a single run off his willow, but kept his calm because he knew that it was just a matter of few hits coming out sweetly from his bat to make up for the lost balls. The Sunrisers’ bowlers, in general, and Bhuvneshwar Kumar, in particular, were getting the ball to talk in the initial five overs of the powerplay and it’s a very onerous task for a player to negate the dangerous early movement. The prodigious bowling in the first five overs restricted the best batting side of the tournament to just 20 runs and that too at the expense of Faf du Plessis’ wicket. With the scoreboard pressure mounting and his own strike-rate hovering around a run-in-two- balls, any other normal player would have cracked under the pressure giving Sunrisers the opening they needed but Shane Watson, after spending all these years toiling in the cricketing arena, wasn’t the nut who would crack so easily. He waited patiently for the movement to subside and then launched his beast mode to measure every nook and corner of the Wankhede Stadium. Watson’s herculean effort will shine as a very bright jewel in the league of best-paced cricket innings as it was very easy for Watson to succumb to the mounting dot-ball pressure and gift his wicket away. But instead, he chose to bring all his resilience into play and concentrated on pacing his innings by making short targets. He first went about erasing the deficit that was lingering between the number of balls faced by him and the runs scored off them. “After those first ten balls, I was only hoping to catch up to at least a run-a-ball. Bhuvi is really good with the new ball and was lucky to get the opportunity to catch up. It was good that I got a couple of boundaries to hit and get on par to take it from there,”said Watson while explaining his approach to the inning. Those boundaries that Watson talked about, came in the last over of the powerplay where he sent Sandeep Sharma for consecutive sixes and a four to kickstart his dominance over the Sunrisers’ bowling unit. Watson, along with the other Chennai batsmen, took the best approach of playing out Rashid Khan, the premium weapon in Kane Williamson’s bowling arsenal and then take on the rest of the bowlers. The four overs of Rashid went for just 24 runs while the likes of Sandeep, Siddharth Kaul, and Shakib Al Hasan were taken for more than thirteen runs an over. Watson was particularly belligerent on Sandeep as he smacked him for twenty seven runs, which included three back-to-back sixes, in the thirteenth over to kill the chase then and there. It’s time for the big Australian to soak into the adulation that he so rightly deserves for not giving up on his cricket love even after a horrible season last year. He was under tremendous pressure and even considered calling it quits to the game, he so dearly loves, but it was that very love which got the better of his low-confidence and paved the way for his resurgence, first in the Big Bash League, and then in the IPL. For more latest IPL News, Cricket News, Sports News visit our site - https://www.cricxtasy.com