How Duffy aced the conditions at Chinnaswamy and negated the SRH batting threat

Jacob Duffy (PC: IPL/BCCI)

In T20Is, Abhishek Sharma has smashed Jacob Duffy for 81 runs in a mere 31 deliveries. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that after his game-breaking spell against Sunrisers Hyderabad, the New Zealand pace bowler joked to the host broadcaster, “I am sick of bowling to Abhishek.” But at some point, the tide was set to turn. In the 2026 IPL opener, Duffy – representing Royal Challengers Bengaluru – pulled one back on his nemesis as he dismissed Abhishek for just seven. 

There were a couple of differences with regard to how Duffy went about bowling to Abhishek in their previous encounters in India. Despite having the required bowling mechanics, he wasn’t exactly looking to extract bounce on some of the Indian wickets in the bilateral series and the T20 World Cup. But on a pleasant night in Bengaluru, he got good height on his short ball to Abhishek. Subsequently, the ball hit higher up on the bat and the left-hand batter could only spoon a catch to the wicketkeeper. 

He also removed the dangerous Travis Head and Nitish Kumar Reddy with short deliveries to put SRH on the back foot. With the RCB set-up, Duffy seemed to have backed his strengths – that is to hit the bat hard on impact.  The other salient feature was that the fresh pitch at the Chinnaswamy Stadium offered some tennis-ball bounce for the fast bowler to extract life out of it. Just expand the point and you will observe that 24 of the 40 wickets taken by the seamers at the Chinnaswamy since the start of the 2025 IPL have been by sticking to the short-ball maxim. Somewhere it gives an inkling of the conditions at the aforesaid ground. 

Yet Duffy deserves all the praise. To illustrate the point further, let’s reconsider the wicket of Abhishek – Very few bowlers would have found that kind of lift. Here, one has to remember that the square boundaries were around 64 metres. If Duffy hadn’t pounded the deck hard, the story could have been vastly different while bowling to the likes of Abhishek and Head. 

The Jacob-Duffy story has a larger narrative. Although Duffy had a strong start to his international career against Pakistan in 2020, he couldn’t secure a regular place in the New Zealand set-up. So much so that even when Matt Henry couldn’t play in the Champions Trophy final last year, Nathan Smith was preferred to him. Since then he has metamorphosed into one of New Zealand’s lead bowlers – 84 of his 122 internationals wickets have come in the last 12 months. There was a minor blip during his recent outings in India, but it didn’t take long for him to strike out that setback and return to form at the Chinnaswamy stadium.

From playing imaginary Tests with his brother to rubbing shoulders with the best in international cricket, the boy from a town inhabited by 492 people, has finally arrived on the big stage.

The post How Duffy aced the conditions at Chinnaswamy and negated the SRH batting threat appeared first on Sports News Portal | Revsportz.



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