Prasidh Krishna was at the receiving end as Ravindra Jadeja tilted the balance in CSK's favour in the penultimate over ©BCCI/IPL
As the evening sun was starting to pack up in Abu Dhabi, Eoin Morgan faced a big, decisive moment. Andre Russell had hobbled off during the 17th over after feeling a pop in his hamstring. He watched on while just about staying on his feet with the help of the boundary hoarding, as Morgan turned to Prasidh Krishna for the penultimate over.
The mathematics had been done. Russell's unavailability to bowl his fourth meant that Morgan had Prasidh and Sunil Narine to go for in the final two overs, when CSK needed 26 off 12. Not a nerve on the faces on the CSK bench moved as Ravindra Jadeja took guard, even as L Balaji, their bowling coach, felt a sense of deja vu.
Morgan's decision to thrust the young Prasidh into the pressure situation was a calculated move. The end that the 19th over was being bowled from had a shorter leg side boundary for left-handers, which may have played into the hands of Jadeja and Sam Curran had Sunil Narine been handed the ball. Even a couple of unconvincing leg side swipes against the slower bowler would've sailed over and quickly titled the game away from KKR. This move gave Morgan the chance to pit CSK's two southpaws against Narine and the bigger leg side dimensions in the 20th over, and hope for a late squeeze.
But when the cold calculations of Morgan met with Jadeja's marauding bat swing, there was only one winner. The chase had entered a phase where mini-turnarounds came in thick and fast, until Prasidh bowled a slow short ball on the leg side, allowing Jadeja the time to swivel-pull it over deep square leg. Morgan got calculative again, bringing his fine leg and deep square leg inside and pushing his long on back.
But once again Jadeja was in the best position to render those tweaks worthless, hitting a fuller ball in his arc way over long on. The underfire Prasidh overcompensated by going wide outside the off-stump and missed the yorker by quite a margin and watched in horror as Jadeja picked up eight more runs behind point, dragging the equation down from 26 off 12 to 4 of 6.
"I thought when Ravi (Jadeja) was playing, he'd do some magic," Balaji later said. Jadeja's 8-ball 22 rekindled one of the few fond memories from 2020 for Balaji, when the all-rounder
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