By Prakash Nair 
Lucknow, May 23: There is something quietly poetic about the way this IPL season ends for two teams who, for very different reasons, have spent the last few weeks watching everything go sideways.
Lucknow Super Giants are already done. Finished. Rooted to the bottom of the table with four wins from thirteen games, they are playing tonight because the schedule says they have to. Punjab Kings, on the other hand, are playing because six losses in a row have reduced an unbeaten start to rubble, and this right here, tonight at the Ekana Stadium is their last shot at salvaging something from a season that somehow fell apart in slow motion.
Match 68. 7:30 PM IST. Lucknow.
Both sides got here through different kinds of suffering.
LSG’s Last Match A 220 That Still Wasn’t Enough
Four nights ago in Jaipur, Lucknow batted beautifully and still lost by seven wickets. That is not a typo. That is just this LSG season, bottled and labelled.
Mitchell Marsh was magnificent. He scored 96 off 57 balls against Rajasthan Royals all power, minimal fuss, the kind of innings that makes you wonder what this side might have been with slightly better fortune around him. Josh Inglis came out alongside him and made 60 off 29, the two of them putting on 109 off 50 balls for the first wicket before most people had properly settled into their seats. Rishabh Pant chipped in with 35 off 23 in the back half. LSG finished at 220/5. By any normal measure, a score to defend.
Then Vaibhav Sooryavanshi happened. The fifteen-year-old took a few balls to settle, scored five off his first ten deliveries, and then proceeded to hit 88 more off the next 28. His final line read 93 off 38 balls, ten sixes. Rajasthan chased 221 in 19.1 overs with five balls to spare and barely broke a sweat in the second half of the chase. For LSG, it was their ninth loss of the season. Another night of bowling well enough but not well enough, another night of leaving Marsh’s effort unrewarded.
They come into tonight having lost their last match by seven wickets after putting up 220. The problem, as it has been all season, is not always about the runs they score. It is about everything else.
Punjab’s Freefall The RCB Loss That Summed It All Up
Go back six days to Dharamsala, and you get the clearest picture of what has gone wrong for Punjab.
Royal Challengers Bengaluru came to the HPCA Stadium needing a win to confirm their playoff spot. They got it comfortably, winning by 23 runs. But the manner of Punjab’s batting collapse is what stays with you. Bhuvneshwar Kumar a thirty-five-year-old pacer who has been around long enough to have a Wikipedia page longer than most Indian novels came out in the powerplay and dismantled Priyansh Arya and Prabhsimran Singh inside the first three overs. Two of Punjab’s most dangerous batters, gone before the game had properly started. Shashank Singh fought hard for his 56 off 27, but the target never felt accessible after that opening damage. Punjab were bowled out for 199 chasing 223.
That was their sixth straight loss. Before that run began, they had won six on the trot and were being discussed as genuine table-toppers. Nobody is discussing that now.
The strange thing about this collapse is that it has not been caused by one single thing going wrong. The openers have misfired. The middle order has been inconsistent. The bowling, which was Punjab’s great strength early in the season, has conceded totals it should not have. It is the kind of all-round deterioration that is harder to fix precisely because there is no obvious single lever to pull.
For what it is worth, Punjab did beat LSG earlier in this same season one of those six opening wins. It feels like another era entirely.
What This Match Actually Comes Down To
Strip everything back and this is a fairly simple problem.
Punjab need to bat well, score a total the Lucknow top order cannot simply overpower, and then bowl with the kind of discipline their attack showed early in the season. Simple in theory. The last six matches suggest otherwise.
The Marsh-Inglis opening partnership is the first and most important battle of the evening. Marsh has 499 runs at a strike rate of 169.72 this season. That is not a fluke or a hot streak that is sustained, consistent destruction across fourteen innings. If Arshdeep Singh gets him inside the powerplay, Punjab have a game. If Marsh settles in and Inglis keeps pace with him, the match could be decided before the halfway point of the first innings. That is not an exaggeration. That is just what this opening pair does when it clicks.
On the other side of it, Punjab’s openers Prabhsimran, Arya, Cooper Connolly are capable of exactly the same kind of powerplay assault. Connolly has scored 365 runs at a strike rate of 162 this season. Prabhsimran has 361 at 176. Those are extraordinary numbers from an opening combination that, for reasons nobody can quite explain, has looked fragile every time a decent pacer has run in hard and full against them in the last month.
The Ekana pitch has historically assisted spin, kept scoring rates modest, averaged something in the 155-run range across matches this season. That is worth keeping in mind both ways Punjab’s batting approach is built on tempo and aggression, and a slow surface can defuse that quickly. At the same time, Yuzvendra Chahal bowling on a turner at Lucknow in a must-win game is a frightening prospect for any batting lineup.
One more factor: it is 43 degrees in Lucknow tonight. That has real consequences for fast bowlers managing load across four overs. Arshdeep, Marco Jansen, whoever Punjab’s new ball pairing is they will be working in conditions that are legitimately punishing. The better-conditioned side tends to hold up. LSG, at home, presumably know this ground.
The Psychological Wrinkle Nobody Talks About Enough
Here is the thing about playing a dead-rubber opponent in a must-win game: it is not as comfortable as it sounds.
LSG have nothing to lose. That phrase gets used as a throwaway line in previews, but it actually means something on the pitch. A batter with no pressure hits the ball differently. A bowler trying something he would not risk in a tight playoff race can unlock a wicket he would never have got otherwise. Lucknow’s players are not playing for points tonight. Some of them are playing for next year’s auction price. Some are playing for pride. Some are playing because Marsh simply loves batting and this is a good pitch to bat on. None of those motivations produce a side that lies down.
Punjab, by contrast, carry the weight of six straight failures into this game. That is a psychological load that even the most experienced players find hard to ignore. Shreyas Iyer will know this. His talk in the dressing room before tonight’s match will need to address it directly. Whether it lands is another matter entirely.
The Final Word
There is a version of tonight where Punjab come out, bat without fear for the first time in three weeks, post 190-plus, and Chahal spins Lucknow out for 160-odd. That version is entirely possible. The talent is still in that dressing room.
There is also a version where Marsh and Inglis put on another hundred-plus opening stand, Punjab’s batting collapses against Lucknow’s underrated pace attack, and Shreyas Iyer walks back to the pavilion knowing the season is over before the 14th over.
Both feel real, which tells you everything about where Punjab are right now. A team you cannot quite back confidently, against a team with no reason to cooperate.
For LSG, this is a final night under their own lights, in front of their own crowd, with a chance to give Marsh the platform to do what he has done all season and go out with something resembling a performance worth remembering. For Punjab, it is simply do-or-die a phrase that has been used so many times in cricket previews that it has almost lost its weight, except that tonight it is entirely literal. Lose, and the season ends. Win, and they watch Sunday’s match with their hands shaking.
Lucknow should be loud tonight. It usually is.
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- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
