Who is Yash Dayal? The left-arm pace bowler who gave away 30 runs in a single over while bowling to Rinku Singh in the 2023 IPL game. But that point is juxtaposed by Dayal’s last-over heroics over two Indian Premier League seasons, where he stopped MS Dhoni from taking his side home.
The first one of them came at the Chinnaswamy stadium on May 18, 2024, leading to wild celebrations among Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s fans. Roughly a year later, he repeated his heroics at the same stadium. Interestingly, that one over in the just concluded RCB-CSK game serves as a microcosm of Dayal’s entire career so far – a rollercoaster ride.
With 15 runs to defend, he ushered in three low full tosses and one of them resulted in the key scalp of Dhoni. If RCB’s fans thought that dismissal had sealed the game, they were in for a surprise. With some dew around, the very next offering slipped out of Dayal’s hand and it turned out to be a high full toss.
Shivam Dube duly deposited it over the deep midwicket fence. It also was called a no-ball for height. Suddenly, the pressure was right back on the left-arm pacer. The next three deliveries, however, went for a mere three overs and RCB eked out a win by the barest of margins – two runs.
So, what worked for Dayal? There is an old maxim in cricket that it isn’t easy to club low full tosses for sixes. Yes, the buffer to nail a yorker has reduced to some extent. And that extends to the low full toss as well. However, it seems to work for Dayal. Maybe the over-the-wicket left-arm angle also acted as a shield for Dayal. Whatever it was he had once again delivered for RCB at a crunch time.
Last year, Dayal had this to say about the mental battle of bouncing back from a setback. “To be very honest, after that match (versus KKR, in the 2023 IPL), I was told, ‘don’t see the social media’. But I ended up seeing the social media a bit, I got a bit hurt about what the fans were thinking about me,” he had said to the host broadcaster. “In two-three days, I got sick. I then got fit. I knew that I wasn’t the first person against whom all this had happened. So, I concentrated more on the process that I play more matches, that I come back into a similar situation, so that I could tackle it.”
On that fateful day in Ahmedabad, while watching the tears trickle from Dayal’s eyes, it felt as if there were a few more fine stanzas to be penned in his career. A couple of years later, he has not just proven his detractors wrong, but also to himself that he belongs to top-flight cricket.
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