The two best teams as established over the course of a gruelling two-month regular season make it through the playoffs to meet each other for a shot at glory in the Indian Premier League. Two teams with one trophy, aiming to add a second star to their chest. One team which finished its long drought after 18 painful years, now gunning for back-to-back victories to engrave themselves into the league’s history for good. Another which won the trophy the first time of trying, and will have their home stadium play host to the title game in a season they have refused to play by anyone else’s rules.
Royal Challengers Bengaluru vs Gujarat Titans, at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, the trophy only one win away.
No chinks in RCB’s armour
RCB return to the venue where they finally got their hands on that trophy, twelve months ago, to bring an end to an agonisingly long wait. The chance to get to that stage again hasn’t taken long. The team in red are a unit which is well-constructed and is simultaneously greater than the sum of its parts. Hard work behind the scenes right through the year, combined with all the right plans and ideas about how modern T20 works, coalescing in a team which has developed that crucial winning habit.
Rajat Patidar’s team enter the finals after nine convincing wins in the group stages, with only a few aberrations. The captain himself has been a star, and played one of the knocks in the tournament to get past this same opposition in Qualifier 1 in Dharamshala. He’s no stranger to important playoff knocks, but RCB are a team which find its strength in the lack of any real holes. Opening aggression, check. Middle order dependability, check. Finishing power, check. Powerplay wickets and death economy, check and check. The places on a cricket field where you can outdo them are few and far between.
Gujarat forces teams to play their best cricket
That is something Gujarat were reminded of high in the Himalayas on Tuesday night. They were simply outclassed on all fronts by RCB. However, GT are the kind of team who won’t let that happen to themselves often either. A criticism entering the season was that this GT team didn’t pack the firepower in the batting that the majority of teams brought to the table: in an environment where teams are slaughtering bowling, their batting is dependent on a top three that is closer to the death-by-a-thousand cuts tactic, sticking in for the long haul and based on consistency more than anything else.
That consistency is their greatest strength – become hard to beat, and the margins for the opposition vanish. This is the third time in five years since inception that GT have made it to the final, and it has been with that mantra of consistency being king, and bowling winning championships. With names like Mohammed Siraj, Kagiso Rabada, and Rashid Khan, the scope for mistakes against GT is non-existent. Even impressive knocks often prove to be nowhere close – as RR found out in Qualifier 2, where they dug deep to set a target of 215, only for Shubman Gill and Sai Sudharsan to chase it down with ease by making it look like the opposition had no fielders on the turf at all.
Where will the game be decided?
With 11 century partnerships between them – a T20 record for any wicket – Sudharsan and Gill’s combination is GT’s strength that makes up for their weakness in the middle order, but they will be aware their chances in the final live and die by how effective their bowling can be. They have the advantage of playing in Ahmedabad, a surface they have an innate understanding of, and therefore can take advantage of.
For Bangalore, what they will need to be most careful about is preserving their wickets through the first portion of the innings – they have the template of how to beat GT, but they know that relying on Patidar or David to provide late magic is not the safest way to approach this kind of match. Virat Kohli remains key as the piece that holds it all together, between the ultra-aggressive approach that Venkatesh Iyer and Devdutt Padikkal have been licensed to play with. The deeper Kohli can go, the greater RCB’s chances of success become.
Following this, the decisive element of the game will be how Gill and Sudharsan fare against the new ball bowling of Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Jacob Duffy/Josh Hazlewood, depending on what combination RCB take into the game. If they crumble as they did in Dharamshala, the result will look very similar. If they can do what they did in New Chandigarh instead, they will have the weaker middle overs to target to try and take the game away.
RCB vs GT predicted playing XIIs
RCB predicted playing XII: Virat Kohli, Venkatesh Iyer, Devdutt Padikkal, Rajat Patidar (c), Jitesh Sharma, Tim David, Krunal Pandya, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Suyash Sharma, Josh Hazlewood, Jacob Duffy, Rasikh Dar
GT predicted playing XII: Shubman Gill (c), Sai Sudharsan, Jos Buttler (wk), Washington Sundar, Nishant Sindhu, Rahul Tewatia, Jason Holder, Rashid Khan, Kagiso Rabada, Arshad Khan, Mohammed Siraj, Prasidh Krishna
