Electric boundary riders The entire sequence seemed like a choreographed blur of limbs — Manish Pandey arching his body like a gymnast, pin-balling the six-bound ball to the outfield, crashing heavily on his back, recovering in a micro-second and flinging in a pinpoint throw to the bowler. In the context of the match, this was a priceless bit of intervention. Had not Pandey's elastic limbs, sharp reflexes and nimble thinking not interfered Mahipal Lomror's hefty strike, Rajasthan Royals’ target would have been reduced to 20 off 10 balls, affording them the breathing space in their pursuit of 152. The very next ball, Wriddhiman Saha leapt like he had spring fitted in his sole to snaffle Lomror's edge that was fleecing fast to the ropes. To outset two genuine pieces of acrobatics, Shakib-Al-Hasan pulled out a cute little block off his legs to prevent another boundary, like a composed centre-back pulling off a cool touchline save. With little fortune, or sloppier fielding, Rajasthan Royals would have netted 14 runs off three balls. Instead, they hoarded only four runs, lost a wicket, and pushed down the improbable alley of smashing 21 off the last six balls. Rahane wafted his bat helplessly, Gowtham slogged as hard as he could. But not everyday his smash-and-grab methods work. Rajasthan, eventually, fell 11 runs short of a target that was by no stretch of imagination a steep climb. It was more of a stroll, but Rajasthan made imagined nonexistent potholes and pitfalls en route. Under-rated pace pair Sandeep Sharma and Siddharth Kaul are not the most glamorous of bowlers around, more run-of-the mill. Sharma bowls full, and if there's nothing that the strip offers him, he can be a freebie-emitting bowling machine, peppering one drivable ball after another at a friendly pace. But what he does effectively is that he unerringly bowls in the corridors, extracts subtle, often unnoticeable seam movement both ways. The batsman, expecting gift-stamped deliveries, are suddenly woven into a web of hesitancy. He was almost unhittable with the new ball — his first three overs cost only nine runs, frugal even by ODI standards. Remarkably, it was not a one-off instance—he has conceded only 4.40 runs across 15 overs in four matches. If Sharma has been the sustainer, Kaul has been the destroyer. From a bustling, trying-to-rattle-batsmen-with-pace merchant, he has evolved into a more polished operator, tucked in a few variations like the knuckle ball and the slower deliveries, and sits atop Sunrisers' bowling chart. New cult hero The new cult hero. Screamed the Big Bash League Twitter face soon after Jofra Archer shaped a famous victory for Hobart Hurricanes against Adelaide Strikers at the stroke of New Year. An excited Michael Vaughan tweeted: Can someone help get @craig_arch a English residency ASAP please. Much appreciated. Awe and admiration only swelled as Archer ended the season as one of the brightest tyros in world cricket — the viral snatches of a stunning one handed return catch, 90-plus nose-bridge sniffers, a slingshot direct-hit from long-on and toe-splintering yorkers traversed the Pacific and Indian Ocean into the IPL auction table. Two games into this IPL season, he seems already a wise acquisition. To suggest that his 3/22 was not a one-off, he produced another sterling effort, a 3-for-26 packed with hostility and aggression, craft and cunning, that sometimes belies his relative newness to the international circuit. The beauty — and the definitive reason why he would cease to be a one-season wonder — of his bowling is that there's nothing fanciful or strange about him. The tools at his disposal are quite the old-fashioned ones — the inswinging yorker, the sharp bouncer, the conventional out-swingers, each carefully weighted in and employed with laser-guided sting. For instance, he has a terrific yorker, but he doesn't look to detonate the batsman's stump each time he curls up through that brisk action. He bowled just four against SRH — one of them disarranged the stumps of Shakib Al Hasan, one yielded a single and the other two were dots (one of them was an unplayable one to Kane Williamson, who was then batting on 57). The CricProf fished out an amazing piece of stat—since January 2017, Archer has taken six wickets from 31 yorkers —the most by any pace bowler in world cricket in that time frame—that is a yorker strike rate of 5.1 balls per wicket. The 18th over, in which he nailed Shakib and Yusuf, was the reason, SRH were stifled to 151 His two overs at the death cost them only 12 runs, and in all they could eke out only 25 runs in the last four, which in the T20 context is golden. Then there was that ball of the match that didn't purchase a wicket, the one that stupefied Kane Williamson with its angle, bounce and movement, only for Rahul Tripathi's leaky palms at slip. No wonder WICB and ECB officials are heckling for Archer.
