At the Ferozeshah Kotla on Thursday night, India’s forgotten leg-spinning hope picked up the second hat-trick in the IPL, the 12-run win getting his team’s campaign back on track. Off the first ball of the 20th over, Ravi Teja fell, caught at the long-off boundary. Next ball, Pragyan Ojha skied one to Dilshan, before RP Singh obliged, stumped following a desperate heave.

This will probably go down as one of the great mysteries of this tournament: How can a batting line-up that reads Adam Gilchrist, Shahid Afridi and Herschelle Gibbs — with Rohit Sharma shoring up the middle-order along with Scott Styris — be languishing at seventh spot in the table? It’s been repeatedly pointed out that one big knock or one massive spell can win a game, but this galaxy of champions has now lost eight out of 10 games.

They started off well too — Afridi and Gibbs looked in the mood to finish things off in a hurry. Mishra started the slide by getting them both in consecutive overs. As it turned out, he came back to kill off their defiance as well. Mishra, who was tipped to one day replace Anil Kumble in the Indian line-up, had returned from obscurity with figures of 4-0-17-5. He had also, once again, managed to overshadow the most overshadowed man in Indian cricket.

Overshadowed again

Statistics never tell the whole story, but these are quite interesting. The top five knocks in the Indian Premier League: Brendon McCullum’s brutal 158 against Bangalore on the opening night, Sanath Jayasuriya’s back-breaking, spotlight-stealing 114 not out against Chennai, Adam Gilchrist’s blistering 109 off 53 balls against Mumbai, Andrew Symonds’s testosterone-driven 117 not out against Rajasthan and Mike Hussey’s awe-inspiring 116 not out against Mohali.

Most sixes: David Hussey (17), Gilchrist (16), McCullum and Jayasuriya (15), Shane Watson and Virender Sehwag (14).

Most boundaries, highest strike-rates, highest averages — it’s quite easy to rattle of ‘top-five’ stats without finding a mention of Gambhir in there. It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the mountain of runs he’s piling up in the IPL though.

Today, he rattled off his fifth fifty in 10 games, helping Delhi put up an imposing 194-4 against the travel-weary Chargers.

With 425 sly ones, he’s the tournament’s leading run-getter by some distance (it still feels weird to call him the ‘holder of the Orange Cap’). Unfortunately, he’s still unable to shrug off the habit of getting overshadowed.

For how long can you hold a grudge against a front-foot that goes too far across? How many runs will it take to wipe off the irritation caused by a bat-swing that starts at second slip and ends up anywhere between point and mid-wicket?

By the time he was stumped after some smart bit of bowling by Pragyan Ojha, he had snicked, sliced and thumped his way to 79 — another innings that will get forgotten after Mishra’s last-over heroics, but they’re all adding up to make it a pretty memorable tournament for Gambhir.

Stone thrown at Sehwag

With one ball to go in the penultimate over on Thursday night, there was a brief interruption in play because of a stone-throwing incident targetted at Virender Sehwag. “It is shameful that it happened to a Delhi player in Delhi,” Sehwag said at the post-match press conference.