Royal Challengers Bangalore - victims of self indulgence!

The last day of the league phase produced perhaps the biggest upset of the IPL this season. Who would have thought that Royal Challengers Bangalore, with the marauding run-getter Chris Gayle in top form, would come a cropper against bottom-of-the-table Deccan Chargers?

The vagaries of T20 cricket are too well-known to repeat here. Teams up one day find themselves in the rubbish heap the next, and this has always been more pronounced in the IPL, where the spread of talent is so even that the difference between the favourites and the laggards can be miniscule.

The best example of this comes from what happened in the first two editions of the IPL: Rajasthan Royals looked the worst team but went on to win; Deccan Chargers who looked the best on paper, finished last. The next year, however, Chargers won the tournament. The runners up were RCB who the previous year had finished second-last!  Things can’t get more topsy-turvy than that.

On Sunday, therefore, even before the Chargers roused themselves suddenly from season-long ineptitude – remember they had lost five games in the final over earlier – RCB players should have realised that nothing in this format is secure; that there are no favourites and that victory is not available on a platter, however modest the target.

Luck matters in sport, of course, but I believe RCB lost because they were cocky. True, the molestation case against Luke Pomersbach which had erupted into an international controversy could not have helped the mood in the dressing room. But I don’t think that played any role in their defeat to the Chargers; their batsmen were undone by a sense of false bravado.

On the face of it, RCB looked to be under no threat from a side that had made losing a habit. But victory cannot be taken for granted. Some of the strokes played by their batsmen smacked of misplaced contemptuousness, Gayle included. Rejigging the batting order by promoting Zaheer Khan to whack a few quick runs showed that simple cricket logic had been over-run by needless adventurism.

This is not to undermine the outstanding bowling of Dale Steyn who claimed 3-8 off his four overs to reaffirm his stature as the world’s best fast bowler. But this was not the first time that Steyn had bowled so well in this tournament. On several earlier occasions, however, his team had lost because there was no support from the other end.

I reckon RCB tried to intimidate the Chargers into submission based on de Villiers’ brutal assault on Steyn which had won them the previous match from an almost impossible situation. But this was another day, another match and RCB’s batsmen, who had been heroic when the two teams met last, were now guilty of hara-kiri.

What seemed like a very gettable target suddenly became Mount Everest to climb because de Villiers, Kohli, Tiwary, Zaheer all tried to win through bravado rather than the simple tactic of staying at the wicket and picking runs off the weaker bowlers; barring Steyn and the much-improved Amit Mishra, the rest of the Chargers’s attack could be termed enthusiastic at best.

Personally, I am disappointed that RCB will not feature in the play-offs. They were a classy and highly entertaining team, not the least because of Gayle’s powerful, clean hitting which marks him out as easily the best batsman in this format. The rest of the cast was strong too; A B de Villiers – who wins my favour as the best contemporary batsman in all formats – Virat Kohli, Tillekratne Dilshan, Dan Vettori, Zaheer Khan, Vinay Kumar and Muttiah Muralitharan et al.

This is a formidable line-up which should be winning more matches than losing. At the start of the season, RCB seemed unclear in their tactics to start with and were up and down. In hindsight, it was a mistake to keep Muralitharan out because he was more likely to pick up wicket than Vettori. By the time the captain realised that he was better value in the dug-out than in the middle, some crucial points had been squandered. But after they had struck the right combination, and with Gayle stepping into top gear, it seemed nothing could stop them.

But vanity and self-indulgence are the enemies of good sense. All the effort and hard work of seven weeks was squandered in just a little over 70 minutes of profligacy. Of course they will get another shot at the title – but it is one year away now.