Shaw fires as Ponting's Delhi storm to big target

Challenged by his coach Ricky Ponting to begin fulfilling his "superstar" potential, Prithvi Shaw got his 2021 IPL campaign off on the right note with a devastating 72 from 38 balls in Delhi Capitals' first-up win against Chennai on Saturday.

Shaw combined with fellow opener Shikhar Dhawan, who carried on his outstanding form from the 2020 campaign with a blistering 85 (54), to do most of the work in chasing down a target of 189 with eight balls to spare.

Chennai, put into bat, owed their total of 7-188 to veteran Suresh Raina's 54 and a rapid 34 off 15 by Sam Curran in the death overs.

Ravichandran Ashwin (1-47) and Tom Curran (1-40) proved expensive for Delhi, but new-ball bowlers Chris Woakes (2-18) and Avesh Khan (2-23) brought their team back in the game with steady bowling.

Khan, the 24-year-old fast bowler, had the key wicket of Faf du Plessis off his fourth ball before he returned and knocked back the stumps of captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni as both veteran batsmen went without scoring.

In reply, Dhawan and Shaw took the game away from Chennai with their aggressive opening stand of 138.

India's white-ball specialist Shardul Thakur was smashed for 11 boundaries off his 3.4 overs as the fast bowler conceded 53 runs before getting Dhawan lbw in the 17th over.

Shaw, who was twice dropped, hit nine fours and three sixes before Moeen Ali finally hung onto a catch at deep cover off Dwayne Bravo.

It was an innings of significance for Shaw, who burst onto the international scene in 2018 with a century on Test debut as an 18-year-old, but whose output in last year's IPL was disappointing.

"I've tried (taking Shaw under his wing) the last two years and I've really enjoyed working with him," Ponting told cricket.com.au before departing for India. "I've had some really interesting chats with him through last year's IPL, just trying to break him down, trying to find out exactly what was the right way to coach him and how I was going to get the best out of him.

"But he had an interesting theory on his batting last year – when he's not scoring runs, he won't bat, and when he is scoring runs, he wants to keep batting all the time.

"He had four or five games where he made under 10 and I'm telling him, 'We have to go to the nets and work out (what's wrong)', and he looked me in the eye and said, 'No, I'm not batting today'.

"I couldn't really work that out.

"He might have changed. I know he's done a lot of work over the last few months, that theory that he had might have changed, and hopefully it has, because if we can get the best out of him, he could be a superstar player."

Rishabh Pant, who was handed the captaincy for this season's IPL after Shreyas Iyer was ruled out due to injury, made an unbeaten 15, finishing off proceedings with a straight boundary against the expensive Thakur.

Among the Australians, Marcus Stoinis took 0-26 from two overs and made 14 from nine balls, while Steve Smith was not selected. Both players attended their first practice session with the squad on Friday after clearing quarantine.

Images courtesy BCCI/IPL