Ravichandran Ashwin and innovation go hand in hand. Whenever the off-spinner is bowling, he keeps coming up variations. The Kings XI Punjab skipper turned leg-spinner last year and ended up bowling plenty of that in IPL 2018. This year, he took innovation to another level.
In the 18th game of IPL 2019, KXIP traveled to Chennai to face the Super Kings. The hosts batted first after winning the toss. When Ashwin came into the attack, he tried to fool the batsmen not just once but twice. He changed the action twice in an attempt to confuse the batsmen.
Ashwin mimics Brett Lee and Kedar Jadhav
First, when he was bowling to Faf du Plessis, all of a sudden, in his delivery stride, he mimicked the action of Brett Lee. Ashwin delivered the ball much faster than his usual pace. The batsman was foxed to a certain extent but managed to cut the ball to deep point for a single.
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Then, the off-spinner attempted a new trick while bowling to Suresh Raina. He bowled a delivery with lower arm action, similar to what Kedar Jadhav does. However, it went away from the reach of the batsman outside off and ended up being a wide ball.
Ravichandran Ashwin had a good day with the ball as he bagged figures of 23/3 from 4 overs. He accounted for the wickets of Shane Watson, Faf du Plessis and Suresh Raina. Due to his solid bowling effort, CSK’s progress was dented and they finished with an average score of 160/3 from 20 overs.
However, the defending champions made sure that even 160 was enough to win the game. Harbhajan Singh was the star with the ball for CSK as he picked up 2 wickets for 17 runs. The off-spinner also bowled a maiden over and removed the big man Chris Gayle. Despite KL Rahul and Sarfaraz Khan’s half-centuries, the visitors fell short by 22 runs.
Watch the video of the incident here.
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