CHENNAI: Jamie Overton was the difference in Chennai Super Kings’ morale boosting win against Delhi Capitals at the MA Chidambaram Stadium on Saturday. While his numbers (4/18) may look impressive, it was his hard lengths that he chose to bowl that caught the Delhi batters off-guard. In Delhi’s chase of 213, Overton accounted for key wickets.
The lanky English all-rounder’s performance with the ball is more significant, especially after what he was put to in Chennai’s big defeat to Royal Challengers Bengaluru recently. Overton went for 42 runs in four overs, and was blasted for four sixes and a boundary by explosive Australian batter Tim David. On Saturday, he kept it tight with his hard lengths, and bowled the right kind of ball with venom to get batters out
“He’s rattled everybody tonight with the pace that he had,” CSK’s bowling consultant Eric Simons told in the post-match press conference on Saturday.
Simons explained how Overton and other CSK bowlers discuss their plans and stick to it, and if the situations calls for it, they would adapt. “One of the last things we always say is conditions override planning. So you might get here into having a ball of hard links, seam up, and you find that it's pace of crossing and you have to adapt quickly and I think that's what they did really well tonight,” he said.
With Australian pacer Nathan Ellis – CSK’s designated frontline pacer – getting injured just days before the season began, the onus was on Overton to take that role up and owl across phases. “I think the important thing is that each person finds his way of doing the job in the area of the game that he has to bowl. So he tried something last week which didn't work. But, he really went with his strengths and went with the hard lengths. He's had a good yorker. He's working on an off‑pace delivery, which when you're bowling at 150 kilometres a line, you've got an off‑pace delivery that's around under 120, then it's really effective. So he's done some work on that as well.
Every athlete has his or her own way of recovering from setbacks. Some may take time, while others may respond within days." For Overton, after that beating from David on April 5, it was the latter. Simons explained that he had one of those days. “You have to always look at a performance based on execution and outcome use. Sometimes you bowl the same ball and a wicked ball goes up in the air, the next time it goes over the fence with six. So as bowlers, I think the resilience is perhaps one of the most important things you have to have. And then it's important for a team to give bowlers in the modern game safety. That means you're going to have bad performances. I mean, Arshdeep Singh went for 50 runs today (2/50). That's going to happen. So it doesn't make you a bad bowler, and you need to have the support of your team around you, The guys need to know that we still believe and trust you, and Jamie showed that today,” he said.
More questions in batters mind the better
One of the other things that the former South African bowler has been working with the bowlers is to make batsman contemplate their decisions. Simons, with the example of Capitals’ Proteas pacer Lungi Ngidi, explained on how the bowlers were able to work on tricking batters. “I sit a lot in bowling meetings, and when batsmen are doing certain things, the bowlers talk a lot about it. So, if a batsman scoring behind the wicket, we talk a lot about it, and when a bowler's got a particularly good off‑pace delivery or a good yorker the batters have to talk more about it.
So, as bowlers, we want to get questions in the batsmen's minds, and looking at off‑pace delivery is asking a lot of questions of batsmen and giving them lots of doubt,” he said.
Simons has been key in Ngidi’s growth as a multi-pronged bowler, as he displayed that in the recently concluded Men’s T20 World Cup in India. His off-pace deliveries put batters in a tizzy.
“We know what he does particularly well. He's modeled on what DJ Bravo does and the way he vaults it, which is a very particular way of plotting a slow ball.It has just become more and more effective. So the last sort of 18 months, it's really been really the main weapon in his arsenal,” he said.