(Football news) To what extent do the Lucknow Super Giants protect totals? They have batted first in 18 games since their debut in the 2022 Indian Premier League, winning 15 of them and losing only two, giving them an incredible win-loss ratio of 7.500. With 13 wins and 9 losses, Rajasthan Royals, the second-best team in that measure, are well behind them at 1.444.

Furthermore, LSG has never lost when they have taken the bat and reached 160. The 13th and most recent instance of this occurred on Sunday night against Gujarat Titans, and the victory embodied, in many respects, the reasons they are so adept at defending totals.

It’s never easy to build such a formidable bat-first record, but it gets a little easier if you play your home games at the IPL’s most challenging batting venue. Whether it’s the low, grippy black-soil pitches LSG usually play on or the quicker, higher-bouncing red-soil surface they occasionally use, Lucknow is seldom a straightforward ground to bat on, and consequently to chase on.

LSG captain KL Rahul is aware of this.

“Yeah, it’s a good record to have, obviously, but also it’s where we’ve played, the conditions we’ve played [in],” he said at the post-match presentation on Sunday. “The last time we played here in Lucknow we all saw how the wickets were, it’s a very low-scoring wicket, low-scoring ground, so we’ve defended quite well there, and having that home advantage obviously helps a little bit.

“And yes, the bowlers have come through the ranks in the last couple of years. You’ve seen the same guys playing last season as well, and they’ve adjusted to their roles, and they’re reading the wickets really well, and that’s something that I try to speak to them a lot more off the field, and even at practice and even in the nets, just to try and get them ready to make the right choices in the ground when the pressure is on. I think they’re doing that really well, so yeah, hopefully we can continue this.”

But this is not even half the story, because only four of LSG’s 15 bat-first wins have come in Lucknow. They’ve defended and won on a variety of away and neutral grounds as well.

MS Dhoni coined the term “par-plus total”, and it came to stand for something of a defining philosophy. The teams he captained at Chennai Super Kings tended to have strong spin attacks suited to the conditions at the MA Chidambaram Stadium, and they tended to bat in a way that made sure they usually put up totals that their bowlers could work with, even if their batters didn’t always set your pulse racing.

LSG, whose reliance on spin at their home ground is an ongoing tribute to Dhoni’s CSK sides, have tended to be very good at getting to the par-plus total. Out of the 18 times they’ve batted first in the IPL, they’ve only crossed 200 twice, but they’ve only ended up with less than 150 on one occasion – in a rained-out game.

Often, LSG’s totals have been built on an old-fashioned and increasingly polarising approach, with Rahul setting the tone as their polariser-in-chief: he’s their leading bat-first run-getter with 626 at an average of 52.16 and a strike rate of 139.42. He played another old-fashioned innings on Sunday, a 31-ball 33 that helped stabilise LSG after they had lost two early wickets, with Marcus Stoinis going only slightly harder while scoring 58 off 43.

Is it the ideal approach to batting first in T20? Probably not, but if you have a bowling attack designed to defend par-plus totals – as LSG do, and Royal Challengers Bengaluru (for whom Virat Kohli often plays a similar, and similarly polarising role) do not, particularly in their home conditions – it has its merits, especially in a tournament where you can be the fourth-best team and get into the playoffs.

In their first season, LSG often stacked their line-up with allrounders – they had Jason Holder, Marcus Stoinis, Krunal Pandya and K Gowtham in this game against Rajasthan Royals, for example – and while it sometimes left them with too flexible a batting order, with their middle-order batters never really settling into defined roles, it made their bowling extremely versatile. Given their plethora of options, they could, for example, easily hide the left-arm spin of Krunal if two left-handers were at the crease.

The introduction of the Impact Player in IPL 2023 reduced the value of having so many allrounders, but it has helped LSG’s quest to always have a plethora of bowling options. It has, for instance, allowed them to play three spinners without compromising on their seam attack – Amit Mishra made a few appearances as their third spinner last season, and M Siddharth has been their powerplay spinner this year.

Bowler Siddharth is an intriguing player; he bowls with his left arm and uses the swinging arm ball as his stock ball with the fresh ball. It’s an extremely helpful defensive tool that can be used to shut out the leg side of the bat against both right-handers, who it can cramp up against, and left-handers, who it can be used to bowl around the wicket.

Siddharth is a typical LSG bowler because of all of things. In addition to Krunal, who is an unconventional left-arm fingerspinner who has perfected the art of survival by deft use of angles and delivery pace, their lead spinner Ravi Bishnoi is a distinctive legspinner who enjoys bowling to left-hand hitters.

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