Yash Dayal flips the script on his own terms

Chances are Yash Dayal will never forget April 9, 2023. Chances are, no IPL fan would ever forget that day, either.

Dayal attempted yorker thrice to Rinku Singh and missed it each time. He ended up bowling a half-tracker and that was dispatched for six too. As you’d expect from someone like Rinku. 

It is one thing to be struggling for motivation after such a performance, but the scar that Rinku’s sixes left on his psyche was so severe that he fell ill and lost 7-8 kilos after that match, only to represent Gujarat Titans two more times in the rest of the season.

Fast forward to March 25, 2024 (Monday). Dayal is no longer with Gujarat. He has become a vital cog to RCB’s aspirations in the 17th edition of the IPL after the franchise shelled out INR 5 crore to bag his services. At a venue where bowlers struggled for meaning, Dayal letting go of his past scar and starting a fresh chapter was no more a choice but a necessity.

Mohammed Siraj may have been the most experienced bowler on the side, but he is erratic. Mayank Dagar doesn’t hold pedigree. For all the success of Alzarri Joseph, he has a T20 economy of 8.55. Unless they would come together to force a change, no one was going to change their fortune. Not least against a batting line-up that has Shikhar Dhawan, Jonny Bairstow, Liam Livingstone, and Jitesh Sharma. 

That’s precisely why  Dayal could take a lot of heart from his performance against Punjab Kings without worrying about justifying the price tag further. He bowled in the length and managed to sneak away from the left-handed Dhawan in a three-over burst that was nothing but magic. 

Dhawan feasts on left-arm pacers, having averaged 35.6 in T20s and attacked 59.8% of deliveries, but there was no answer to Dayal’s thunderbolts. In 11 balls that he faced from Dayal, the Punjab skipper could manage four runs, with almost all deliveries moving both ways after landing in good length. The consistency in Dayal’s approach also helped Siraj calm down and bowl to the plan of attacking the stumps.

It surely helped that there was a tinge of grass on the surface. With the two-paced nature of the wicket holding the ball from coming onto the bat, Dayal could grip the game better while letting Glenn Maxwell hit the crack from the BEML End. But putting his spell down to that would be undermining how fluently Prabhsimran Singh batted against other bowlers and how Punjab Kings ended with a first-innings total of 176 runs. 

Royal Challengers Bengaluru are set to play three straight matches at home within 10 days - hence, nothing could be more encouraging than seeing Dayal step up the way he did. Chinnaswamy hasn’t been kind to pacers over the years, but the story can have a quick flip if bowlers take some load off their batters. The beginning couldn’t have been better.