Its Warne vs MSD

It’s the finals of the inaugural IPL tourney. Many speculations were done before the start of the IPL, but cutting all that hay aside, the way RR have performed, can be only quipped as brilliant. The cheapest team of the IPL ends up at the top. What an anticlimax! Like a Bollywood film script, Warne’s boys have turned the tables upside down. A lot of credit should be given to Warne, for his out-of-the-box thinking and improvisations. But one thing did work to his advantage, unlike other teams, he was given a team which had few stars, which meant less rigidity. The problem that teams like MI faced, you can’t make Jayasuriya to bat down the order, he is an opener, same goes for Sachin, it may end up in a mess, as that is the role these batsmen have been playing for a long time, and they are probably the best in the business too. So experimentation in this area goes out of the window.

That is the problem which Warne did not encounter with his rookie team. Most of them are young, novice and need moulding. It can be said that Warne was given a fresh mound of clay, and he moulded it into a fine piece of cricket pottery with his genius.

As fir MSD, he is not in any way lagging behind Warne in terms of alternative thinking skills and experimenting. Both Warne and MSD are wily customers. Now I won’t go bragging about MSD, as I know if I start off, there’s no stopping. I might as well write a book on him ( hehe).

As for statistics, CSK have lost to RR both the times they met in their league matches. So RR do appear to have a psychological advantage over CSK. But as I said, such things don’t always work like this. It can in turn make RR complacent also. So far they haven’t been complacent, but it only takes one match to change that fact. With MSD as captain on the other side, there is hardly a margin for error here. He has a sharp eye, as does Warne.

So it can go either way. RR can lose their winning touch, CSK can bring a gold performance in crunch times.

As the cliché goes, the team that plays the best shall win.

Personally, I support MSD, so its CSK. I admire Warney, but cant go past MSD. :D