As far as making first entrances go, Pat Cummins's at the Uppal Stadium on Friday was nondescript. Majority of the 30,000-odd that filled the venue two hours before the start of play weren't perhaps there to get a glimpse of him before the cricket began. At least that's not what the colour of their jerseys and the name behind it suggested. The on-brand orange bucket seats were eclipsed by a deluge of yellow as cries of CSK... CSK... reverberated around the ground. While cameramen waited close to the stairs connecting the dressing room to the ground in anticipation of filming yet another MS Dhoni montage, Cummins sneaked in on the SRH side of pre-match activities.

His middle-over entrance with the ball in hand though had a sense of performative strut to it. SRH needed fresh ideas as a partnership began to brew between Ajinkya Rahane, a pace hitter, and Shivam Dube, a predominantly spin hitter who has started to take down pace as well. On came the SRH captain in the 10th over, attacking the left-hander from round the stumps and with pace off the ball. It was in this period that the home side began to generously send down the slower bouncer that gripped and stopped and frustrated the batters. The aspects of big square boundaries and a gripping black soil surface aligned perfectly for SRH to execute, repeatedly, this variation. Left-armer Jaydev Unadkat got introduced from the other end with a similar brief - hit the ball into the surface and do it slowly.

Since falling prey to cutters and slower ones in Vizag a week ago, the directive from batting coach Michael Hussey was to be quicker at assessing the conditions and relaying the information to the rest. Rachin Ravindra did it as early as the third ball of the innings when he swept Abhishek Sharma for a four and appeared to be gesturing about the ball skidding on and coming quicker. Ajinkya Rahane learnt of it too, and adjusted very quickly to start timing his hits through the line. It led CSK to a solid base in the first half but they just couldn't find a way out against deliveries dug in

short in the early 120kphs, sometimes even slower.

"The moment it was decided that there were going to be two bouncers in an over, that's when all the bowlers decided that... I've been talking to a lot of bowlers and everyone is of the point of view that we've got to use it in some way. Maybe someone who has pace can use those pace-on bouncers but slower bouncers nowadays are working because all the batters are trying to hit the ball straight, all the batters are trying to muscle the ball out of the ground," Unadkat said after the game.

SRH's indulgence in this variations took the sheen away from Rahane's fluency and Dube, who got to a 23-ball 45 but was undone by a wide slower bouncer from Cummins in the 14th over. In the 15th, Unadkat then put Rahane out of his misery with a ball at 104.8kph that the CSK batter tamely hit to backward point.

SRH extended the relentlessness with which they used slower short balls even to the death overs, as Ravindra Jadeja and Daryl Mitchell were denied the chance to tee off and finish strongly. Cummins showed sharp captaincy awareness with the fields he set, pushing his long on and long off a lot straighter against the New Zealander who enjoys playing down the ground. Just 50 runs came off the last seven overs, despite 13 runs of them coming in just the 18th.

The boisterous CSK fans who pined for the Dhoni that graced Vizag with his six-hitting got a part of what they wanted when he emerged out to bat at five down in the final over. But the rapturous reception couldn't spill over into the first ball he faced - a 127kph short ball from Natarajan that he attempted to cut and missed. The next ball was short and slow too, cutting any possibility of a thunderous cameo to a nondescript 1* off 2 balls. Not for the first time in the last six months, Cummins read the conditions in an Indian venue to perfection and proceeded to silence a crowd overwhelmingly rooting for his opposition.