IPL 2025
Dravid believes the Chinnaswamy surface might finally play true for Wednesday’s clash. © BCCI
Home, in IPL 2025, has been anything but sweet. Teams have struggled to crack their own conditions, unsure whether to trust local intuition or second-guess surfaces that haven’t played to type. Tosses have loomed large, and the grumbles have grown about the need to adapt rather than assert.
Only Delhi Capitals, Gujarat Titans, and Mumbai Indians have managed to win more than they’ve lost at home a little past the mid-way point of the tournament. For the rest, familiarity has bred uncertainty. Rahul Dravid, whose Rajasthan Royals have managed just one win at home, offered a slightly different perspective, a possible mitigating circumstance for the trend.
“I’m not really sure what specific franchises might have wanted from their curators or from their pitches,” Dravid said. “But yeah, I think home advantage, generally, the teams are new as well, right? It’s the first year of a big auction cycle, so for a lot of the players, even though they may be your home players, they are playing for those teams or those grounds for the first time.”
He pointed to a few examples. “Someone like Phil Salt was at KKR and he’s coming here [RCB] for the first time. Nitish Rana, who was not with us before, is playing for us this year, so for him, Jaipur is actually kind of a new ground in some ways.
“So maybe when you just have a big auction and there’s a change of squad and team, the home advantage may not be that significant. But maybe as you go later on into the cycle, you might start seeing that significance a little bit more, because then your players get to practice and play a little bit more on that compared to the opposition team.”
Dravid’s assertion hits home in the fact that RCB’s three defeats at home this time have been orchestrated by players that have played a lot of cricket at the Chinnaswamy Stadium: Mohammed Siraj, KL Rahul and Yuzvendra Chahal. “Do we have an RCB player from last time? Play him in the XI straightaway,” Dravid joked.
“You know, sometimes some opposition players who are coming from other franchises, but who have been at Jaipur before or some who have been at RCB before might have played more at Bengaluru than some of the local RCB players because they are playing for the first year. So, maybe that could be a factor as well that some teams are sort of home advantage is not that prevalent this time. But also, I think the fact is that the games are tight. I mean, I think the teams are really close and closely fought as well. So, that can negate sometimes the home advantage as well. So, it’s hard. I don’t have a perfect answer for that.”
The Royals, desperate to arrest a slide that’s brought just four points from eight games, now run into an RCB side flying on the road but floundering at home. Bengaluru’s pitch, two-paced, with tennis-ball bounce from a good length, has undone RCB’s batting, leaving them with first-innings totals of 169/8, 163/7, and 95/9 (in 14 overs). Dravid, a Bengaluru man himself, believes the surface might finally play true for Wednesday’s clash.
“I mean, you just have to go for it irrespective and that’s a given,” Dravid said when asked about how to approach batting on such surfaces. “But I think every surface will be different. I think the last one, just having a chat with the groundsman, it was under covers for a really long period of time, so it was probably not a good one to judge it on.
“The wicket I’m seeing here, from at least what I can make of it, looks a really good wicket, so I can’t really say how those wickets looked in earlier games. But the track that’s been produced for this one looks actually to be a very good cricket wicket and I think it should be a pretty high-scoring game.
“Like I said earlier, it’s a very important game for us. Every game from here on, the position we find ourselves in, we can’t afford to make many mistakes. We’ve got to start climbing that table quickly and we’ve got to start winning games quickly, there’s no options, no chances of slipping up anymore.”
© Cricbuzz
