The ball dug in short. The pitch making it sit up and not zip through. On middle and off. Shubman Gill does what he must, play the pull. He hits it superbly. But straight to the fielder in the deep. And that's the fourth time Hardik Pandya has dismissed Gill in just 18 balls in T20s.
"It's just the right length [to Gill]. Hardik tends to bowl that back-of-length [delivery] and he's been using that short ball quite effectively," Cheteshwar Pujara said on ESPNcricinfo's TimeOut show after the match. "Gill is someone who has a little bit of vulnerability when it comes to that length. It is his scoring opportunity, but at the same time, when he doesn't get it right, you do get dismissed from that length."
Maybe Hardik knew that - there's very little cricketers don't know these days when it comes to data and numbers, strengths and weaknesses of opponents. Hardik stood there, looking pleased as punch. Of course he knew it would - or could, at least - work. Gill looked like he couldn't believe he had fallen into the trap.
Unwittingly, though, Hardik might have laid a trap for his own batters in the process. On a black-soil pitch, with the ball gripping in the slow surface, slow, slower, slowest was the way to go. Not that Gujarat Titans (GT) or Mumbai Indians (MI) wouldn't have known that anyway before their IPL 2025 match in Ahmedabad on Saturday evening, but seeing the proof in Hardik's plan of action helped - GT stopped MI 36 short after putting up 196, and at no point did it really look like their wouldn't.
"There were some shots that were easy to hit on that wicket, there were some shots that were difficult [to hit], so we were making sure that we make sure that they were hitting difficult shots on that wicket. Which we thought were difficult when we were batting," Gill said in the press conference afterwards. Prasidh Krishna, for one, made the most of the conditions. Going against his nature, so to say, he kept it slow, and into the pitch. And emerged Player of the Match for his 2 for 18.
And Hardik, only half in jest, possibly, agreed that he might have helped Prasidh with the planning. "Definitely, I was just thinking that," he told the host broadcaster. "Maybe I bowled way too many balls - they were able to see that it's gripping.
"On this wicket, I think those were the toughest balls because some were shooting down, some were bouncing and some were gripping. So when you have this much variable bounce or difference, I think as a batter it becomes difficult."