Times Media
TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg
South Africans loom large on the batting hit parade early in this year’s Indian Premier League (IPL) but are conspicuously low on the bowling charts.
The T20 format’s regulations weight the game in favour of batsmen, but Justin Kemp said environmental factors created by the move of the tournament from India to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had further tilted the balance away from bowlers.
“You’ve got to take the grounds into consideration,” Kemp said. “I was watching the game between Rajasthan and Punjab (on Sunday), and Sharjah is pretty small and the pitch is flat.”
Similar conditions prevail at the other venues in Dubai and Abu Dhabi which, together with Sharjah, will host the first 20 of the 60 matches that will be played in this year’s IPL.
Games scheduled for the first two weeks of the tournament were moved from India because they clashed with the Indian elections and the government could not guarantee security for the event.
“It is stacked against the (seam) bowlers - the guys are travelling all over the place,” Kemp said. “The spinners are the go-to guys.”
Three of the best five strike rates in the IPL belonged to spinners, who also owned two of the top five wicket totals.
Kemp, who played for the Chennai Super Kings in the 2010 IPL, expected the gap between batsmen and bowlers to narrow once the tournament moved to India on May 2.
“In India, you get more diversity in the type of wickets you play on compared to the UAE,” he said. “There’s more bounce in Mohali and in Chennai and Bangalore it can get very slow.”
JP Duminy and David Miller were among only four players who had reached 100 runs in their first two games going into yesterday’s match between Chennai and the Delhi Daredevils in Abu Dhabi.
The South African pair’s success did not surprise Kemp: “The sky’s the limit for Miller and JP has been playing excellent T20 cricket for a while now.”
Only Glenn Maxwell, Duminy and Miller had scored half-centuries in each of their two innings, and Jacques Kallis and Duminy owned the third and fourth highest scores. Miller’s nine sixes were the high for the tournament.
Neither Duminy nor Miller had been dismissed. Duminy’s 67 not out for Delhi against Royal Challengers Bangalore came off 48 balls, and he took 35 deliveries to score his unbeaten 52 against the Kolkata Knight Riders.
Miller’s 54 not out against Chennai was the product of 37 balls he faced in the colours of Kings XI Punjab, but he turned on the charm properly against the Rajasthan Royals - smashing an undefeated 51 off 19 balls, six of which he smote for six.
Kolkata’s Kallis followed the 72 he clipped off 46 balls playing the Mumbai Indians with a first-ball duck to the opening delivery of the game against Delhi.
On the bowling front, South Africans did not feature in the top five in terms of wicket-takers, average, strike rate or economy rate. Only two were in the top 10 - Morne Morkel was eighth among wicket-takers and Dale Steyn was sixth in terms of strike rate and seventh in the averages.
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