With just four points after seven games - two fewer than the same stage last year - before Tuesday, Rajasthan Royals were nearing last-chance saloon. And they duly rang in the changes.
Steven Smith was benched for the first time, to bring in the faster-scoring Ashton Turner for the finisher's slot lower down the order. Ajinkya Rahane pushed himself down from the opening spot, getting Rahul Tripathi up top to partner Jos Buttler. It was déjà vu for Royals, who had finally promoted Buttler to the top at the same stage last season, a game-changer that propelled them into the playoffs.
Tripathi's promotion and Turner's inclusion could have to do with Buttler and Smith's impending departures in a couple of weeks for their respective World Cup camps. But Tripathi made 20 off 16 in the Powerplay, and Royals got to 54 for 1, one of their lower totals this season. Tripathi's next 29 balls fetched him only 30 runs, another reminder of his struggles in the middle overs (SR 123 compared to 152 in the Powerplay) when faced with spread-out fields.That could, now, mean more tinkering, unless they want to try the Buttler-Tripathi alternative a couple more times.
As such, Rahane came in at No.4 and found the going tough, struggling to find the gaps in a 21-ball 26, an innings in which he managed to hit just one boundary while the asking rate spiked from 10.6 to over 19. They eventually lost by 12 runs.
KL Rahul's Powerplay slowdown
It's been a feature of his season so far. KL Rahul has struggled to score runs at the start of the innings, in the Powerplay, and the others batting around him have had to do the heavy lifting. Rahul has still scored a lot of runs - three half-centuries and a century before this game - but they haven't come at a T20 clip.
Is that his role? Quite possibly, given Kings XI Punjab's lack of batting depth. They usually play five bowlers - and if one of them isn't Sam Curran, like today, their No. 7 was R Ashwin - and in such a situation a team might need one of their top-order batsmen to be their anchor.
With Chris Gayle and the others taking more risks around him, Rahul has probably played that anchor role, and it can be argued that he has performed it competently more often than not. But the anchor must still rotate the strike, which he - glaringly - failed to do on Tuesday in Mohali against Royals, getting to 4 from 13 balls in the first six overs. Gayle first and Mayank Agarwal later tried to up the tempo, and, after being on 17 from 27 balls, Rahul hit his first boundary only off the 28th ball he faced.
He was outstanding last season, scoring his 659 runs at a strike rate of 158.41. Then, his Powerplay strike rate was 157.57, and he found the boundary once every 3.72 balls in that phase. This year, his Powerplay strike rate is down to under 100, and he pulls off the big shot once every 7.92 balls.
Kings XI Punjab have, right through the season, put up decent totals, except the 138 for 5 against Chennai Super Kings at Chepauk, where batting has been far from easy. But, and we made the point on the day Rahul scored his century - off 63 balls, when Kings XI lost to Mumbai Indians off the last ball - too, Rahul's slowdowns have dragged Kings XI Punjab back.
On the subject of Ashwin, though …
T20 captains and coaches keep talking about how a target of 180-plus changes teams' mental approach to the chase, as compared to, say, something in the 160s. Kings XI were in that territory with five balls to go, having lost their last big hitter in David Miller. Ashwin walked in, smashed 17 off four balls off Dhawal Kulkarni, and pushed Kings XI up to 182, quite likely the difference in the end.
Kings XI - conservative against wristspin?
Why did Royals give Ish Sodhi his IPL 2019 debut against Kings XI? Well, why not, he is an excellent legspinner, after all. But dig into the numbers, and an interesting picture emerges.
The Kings XI batsmen, while aggressive on the whole, have been rather conservative against wristspin this season. Agarwal has been the exception among the main batsmen, as evidenced in his approach to Sodhi and Shreyas Gopal on Tuesday. They have the third-poorest strike rate against such spinners in the middle overs (7 to 15) in 2019 so far.
They do have an excellent average - 43.7 - against wristspin in the same period (Delhi Capitals are the only team above them on that list), but a mediocre balls-per-boundary score of 9.5, which only goes to show that they have been cautious when faced with wristspinners. Sodhi, playing his first game of the season, went for 41 runs, but those figures only tell a part of the story. He got Agarwal's wicket in his second over, conceded just 22 off his first three, before Rahul and Miller clubbed him for 19 in his final over.
With inputs from Gaurav Sundararaman and Shamya Dasgupta