How Pat Cummins made his least reliable balls count

Pat Cummins made the difference on Wednesday with two kinds of deliveries that have usually brought him trouble in the IPL: the short ball and the slower ball.

Across his IPL career, anything he has bowled in that shorter-than-hard length, bouncer zone has gone at over 12 an over. His slower balls are in the same boat. An over of cutters and off-pace deliveries has historically cost him nearly three runs more than an over in which the ball does not move at all.

Neither sounds like the obvious formula for defending 235 in Hyderabad, especially against a Punjab Kings side that had not lost a chase all season and had only a few nights ago gunned down 262, the highest-ever chase in IPL history. But those were the very methods Cummins kept returning to during his match-winning spell of 2 for 34 that took SRH to the top of the points table.

Punjab's chase began with the usual sense that 236 was still within sight. Hyderabad has marginally favoured teams batting first this season, but this was a day-night game on the flattest strip on the square. Heinrich Klaasen had summed it up at the innings break when he joked that he would "put it in my pocket and take it everywhere."

Come the first over, Cummins had the ball with a slip and gully waiting. For the fifth ball, with Priyansh Arya back on strike, Cummins banged in a proper short one at 147kph. Third man and deep backward square were the two men outside the ring. Arya swung and missed. For the last ball, SRH assistant coach James Franklin described it as "a little bit pre-planned." Cummins sent mid-on back and brought third man inside, a field that suggested a fuller delivery. Instead came the bluff. He held the ball deeper in his palm, banged in the bouncer even shorter but at only 130kph, and completely befuddled Arya. The left-handed opener hooked, the top edge went high and Eshan Malinga completed the catch.

It was the first sign that this would not be just another spell from Cummins. Sometimes the bluff was in the field. Sometimes it was in the pace. Sometimes it was simply in making Punjab think. "Just try and move the field, pretend a bit more is happening than actually is," he would admit later with a smile. "Not much has worked in the Powerplay for any team really, so we tried to be a bit more proactive today."

His second over in the Powerplay was not wicket-taking but it was just as important in context. Cooper Connolly took a four and a six off him, the latter off a free hit, but Cummins still finished his first two overs with 17 runs and Arya's wicket. Against a batting side whose best chases are usually built on openers detonating early, that was enough of a dent.

Punjab slipped further after that. Nitish Kumar Reddy found outswing to remove Prabhsimran Singh. Eshan Malinga got Shreyas Iyer with a scrambled seam delivery. Marcus Stoinis did not last against the left-arm wristspinner. At 64 for 4, SRH had a hand on the game but when Connolly and Suryansh Shedge took 35 runs in two overs off SRH's young spinners Harsh Dubey and Shivang Kumar, the chase threatened to come to life again.

This was when Cummins had little choice but to bring himself back on, even if it meant switching to the opposite end. By then, he and SRH had a clearer read on what the pitch had begun to do. "The feedback from our batters was that as the innings went on, the pitch slowed down quite a lot," Franklin said.

Cummins' third over was built entirely on that. With the shorter side to defend, he placed three men deep on the legside but all in front of square, and blocked the cross-batted shots through off-side with a deep point and a third man. Cummins unleashed the slower bouncer at 118kph and asked Shedge to generate all the pace on the hook himself. The young right-hander took it on but could not clear Abhishek Sharma in the deep.

That wicket captured the larger point of the spell. The short ball by itself has been expensive for Cummins in this league. The slower ball by itself has been expensive too. Against PBKS, he did not trust either as a standalone delivery. He kept blending them with each other and with the setting around them. Of his 25 balls on the night, eight were short, seven were slower, and six sat in the overlap, meaning slower balls banged into the pitch.

SRH's catching completed the plan in a way Punjab's never quite managed in the first innings. Malinga ran in well to take Arya. Abhishek held on to Shedge. Punjab had put down Ishan Kishan twice and Klaasen once. Cummins, by contrast, had the luxury of seeing his setups come to fruition.

"I think the main thing that Pat brings is obviously the knowledge of the game, but also a calmness and all the guys feed off it," SRH head coach Daniel Vettori said. "And when you're defending these big totals, there's a lot going on. So to have that cool head really helps the team."

At the toss, Cummins had said he "can't read pitches." At the presentation, he said he "did not know how" he had got the Player-of-the-Match award either. What he did know, though, was exactly how to bowl on this one.