Yuzvendra Chahal just couldn't catch a break. After being bought for INR 18 crore in the IPL 2025 auction, he hadn't completed his quota in three of his first five games for Punjab Kings (PBKS). In the last of those, he hurt his shoulder but recovered in time to face Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR). His team had been struggling to get him into the game and that threatened to be the case again in Mullanpur on Tuesday.
KKR had rolled PBKS over for 111 and were in control of the chase in the seventh over. They needed 52 from 13 overs with eight wickets in hand. That's when Chahal was introduced.
The pitch was far from a minefield. Sunil Narine and Varun Chakravarthy had picked up two wickets each, but they were getting turn in a way mystery spinners do - with quicker speeds and shorter lengths while keeping the stumps in play.
Chahal didn't have that luxury. He is more old-school who looks to deceive batters in the air and off the pitch. That hadn't worked for him so far this tournament. He started his spell with a legbreak to Ajinkya Rahane that got a bit of turn, which signaled to both the bowler and his captain Shreyas Iyer that they were in the game.
"Shreyas said we needed a slip because we couldn't let go of even a single chance - there was no point bringing in a slip after a ball goes for four through there," Chahal said after the game. "We had to attack, because we had few runs to work with, and we knew that we could win only by picking up wickets."
The first googly he bowled beat Rahane on the sweep and trapped him lbw. Chahal was lucky to have that wicket as ball-tracking showed that the impact was outside off stump and KKR didn't review. More importantly, it was clear that Chahal's methods suited not only the conditions but also the situation.
He didn't need to bowl magic balls. Instead, he had to make the batters generate their own pace, especially if they were looking for boundaries. On a day where a lot of the wickets fell not because of good balls but batters trying to manufacture shots as a marker of initiative and, in KKR's case, to coast home, Chahal's advantage was amplified.
Angkrish Raghuvanshi, who was well set at 37 off 27 balls, made room and tried to go inside out over cover but the ball dipped on him and landed slightly shorter than what he would have hoped for. It meant that he had to reach further away and couldn't open the face of the bat to control the direction in which the ball went.
"I was varying my pace," Chahal said. "If the opposition's batters wanted to hit sixes, they had to put in effort to do it."
In the games against Rajasthan Royals (RR), Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) and Lucknow Super Giants (LSG), he bowled short in his first over and went for boundaries. That did not allow him to settle into his spells. The same thing could have happened against Raghuvanshi. Instead, Chahal had two wickets in seven balls.
Suddenly, KKR were four down and PBKS had a sniff, but it was only a sniff, so Chahal had to mix attack with defence. He mixed his pace against Rinku Singh to avoid being lined up. After four balls at the stumps, he floated the last one teasingly wide. Rinku danced down the pitch but wasn't to the pitch of the ball, so he kicked it away towards cover.
In the next over, though, Rinku didn't have a second line of defence. He was lured onto the front foot, reaching out and realising halfway through that the ball had drifted in. His bat-face closed ever so slightly but it wasn't enough to avoid being beaten on the inside edge and stumped.
Chahal and PBKS rode the chaotic wave when Ramandeep Singh went for a paddle sweep first ball but ended up lobbing it to Shreyas - moving from regulation slip to leg slip as the batter got into his shot - behind the wicket. Even though the roll of the dice did not work against Andre Russell, Chahal had done enough to set up the win.
Ricky Ponting said at the end of the match that one of the things PBKS had been lacking was belief with the ball. Chahal, who might not even have played the game, managed to get into his element for the first time in PBKS colours and ended up being the major reason for that belief to grow.