The Kolkata Knight Riders staged an incredible comeback in the final 10 overs of the game to defeat Chennai Super Kings in the 21st match of the Indian Premier League 2020 at Abu Dhabi on Wednesday 7 November.
Down and out after scoring a below-par 167 in the first innings, Kolkata dug the hole for themselves in the first half of the second innings, with CSK cruising at 90/1 at the 10-over mark. Or so it seemed that time with Dinesh Karthik deciding not to bowl his best bowler Sunil Narine for a single over of the first half of the game.
What unfurled next was a thing of beauty. KKR bowlers led by Narine choked the life out of Chennai batsmen, letting them score just 67 runs for the loss of 4 wickets to write an incredible story in the IPL.
On that note here are the three reasons why the Kolkata Knight Riders, down and out by a country mile, pulled off an incredible heist against Chennai Super Kings.
Sunil Narine was dropped. Not from the side, but from the batting line-up after a long long time. Since the discovery of his pinch-hitting prowess, Sunil Narine has been Kolkata’s top-order batsmen for quite some time now. After a poor patch of form, Narine was finally dropped down the order for the CSK match and that spot was given to Rahul Tripathi, a natural opener who batted at 8 due to the lack of space in the pecking order.
To say that he made the best of the opportunity would be a massive disrespect. In the team’s total of 167, Tripathi alone made 81 off 51 balls. He played a defiant innings laced with 3 sixes and 8 boundaries while his partners kept departing throughout the time he was in the crease.
Tripathi’s success at the top of the order means that Narine, who struggled against the pacers throughout this tournament can now be played as a floater, sent in to take on the spinners and go gung-ho from the first ball. This on paper should not only give KKR better balance and more varied options in an already dynamic batting order.
The victory over Chennai last night was engulfed in old school romanticism. This was a victory of a captain that had faith in his plans. Plan to come into the game with something concrete and then be flexible enough to chuck the whole thing into the ground and reshape it with an immaculate reading of the game.
Dinesh Karthik came into the match facing tremendous backlash from the Delhi Capitals encounter. Several calls starting from Narine opening despite repeated failures, Eoin Morgan coming in at 6 and Rahul Tripathi batting at 8 did not sit well with the fans.
And then he pulled the rabbit out of the hat.
In the day and age of statistical analysis, he committed several crimes. Defending a paltry target of 168, he did not bowl his top bowler (Narine) in the first 10 overs, he bowled out his best fast bowler at the halfway mark of the game and he seemed unbothered about the scoring rate in the earlier half of the CSK chase.
Just when tempers started flaring once again, came the turnaround. Saving Narine for the second half of the innings became a masterclass. Combined with Varun Chakravarthy, Kamlesh Nagarkoti and Andre Russell Knight Riders choked the life of the opposition.
From 90/1 in 10 overs, CSK imploded to lose the game by 10 runs.
The victory was an ode to the cricketing brains that have been shaped over years and years of victories, failures and learning, rather than stats, analytics that have taken the game by storm over the last few years. The game was DK's return to elite status in the Indian Premier League.
If your lower middle-order batsman defends the first ball when 39 runs are required of the last 21 balls, you can safely assume that there is a problem in approach.
And there was. For sure, Kolkata need to be credited for their exceptional performance, but there makes no sense that a team cruising at almost 10 runs an over at the midway mark simple give up. Coming into bat in the 17th over, Kedar Jadhav played an inexplicable innings of 7 runs off 12 balls that dug CSK’s grave.
And what a turn of events has it been for CSK in a space of three days. The other night their openers shared a record 181-stand for the franchise and last night against a struggling KKR, they put up their hands in the air and said, I surrender.
The Kolkata Knight Riders would be super, super proud of their victory against CSK. The positives from the game outweigh the shambolic performance by a country mile and Kolkata as a team would like to gain momentum from that. Not only did Karthik got his thinking hat back, they now have a proven opener and a floater than can be as effective in the middle order as he was in the opening overs of the game.
KKR play their next game against Kings XI Punjab on 10 October at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium and would like to keep their momentum on to stay at the top of the IPL table.
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