Hello everyone. Let's talk about the match that was played between Kolkata Knight Riders and Sunrisers Hyderabad on the first Sunday of this year's IPL.
Both teams have a strong core of foreign players and these are the only two teams in the competition that have a foreign player as their captains. Eoin Morgan, the World Cup winning captain of England is leading KKR, and SRH is led by David Warner who's been among the best player of the tournament in the last 6-7 seasons.
SRH won the toss and asked KKR to bat first on the MA Chidambaram Stadium of Chennai. The pitches at Chennai are expected to favour the spinners and hence a low-scoring match was expected, something similar to what we saw in the season opener between MI and RCB. But the two teams had a different style of play in their mind.
Opening the innings for KKR, Nitish Rana and Shubman Gill made their intentions clear soon and they scored 50 runs in the power play overs only. Gill didn't last for long after that and was dismissed by Rashid Khan on 15 with a googly. But Rana and Rahul Tripathi continued playing the big shots and both put up a 93 runs partnership. Tripathi was later dismissed by Natarajan on 53 and Andre Russel too departed soon after him. The scoring rate came down a little in the last 8 overs when Rana and Morgan were dismissed off consecutive balls by Nabi. But Dinesh Karthick's 9 balls - 22 runs took KKR's total to 187 in 20 overs and SRH needed 188 to win the match.
SRH also didn't have a good start to their inning and they lost both their openers in the first 3 overs. KKR bowlers bowled a much tighter line early in the inning and SRH could manage only 35 runs in the first 6 overs during the field restrictions. But Johnny Bairstow and Manish Pandey took SRH out of trouble and increased the scoring rate after that and SRH made 100 runs in 12 overs. Bairstow had reached his half-century and they needed 88 runs in the remaining 8 overs. But that's when the twist came. Bairstow was dismissed in the 13th over and Nabi in 16th. SRH needed 57 runs in the final four. And that proved to be too much in the end as SRH could get to 177 only and KKR won the match by 10 runs and started their upward journey in the leaderboard. Abdul Samad and Manish Pandey kept the game alive for SRH till the last over but Russel bowled impressive 18th and 20th overs for KKR.
KKR's batsmen did their job well today as 180+ on Chennai's pitch is a very good score any day and their bowlers too did well in the first 6 and last 5 overs. Harbhajan Singh bowled only one over. He could have bowled a few more but nobody would complain because of the match result.
Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Sandeep Sharma had a bad day for SRH as they leaked the most runs but SRH would expect both their front-line bowlers to come back strongly in the next game. And we can expect Warner too to get in the groove soon.
Up next on 12th April, KL Rahul's Punjab Kings would be facing Sanju Samson's Rajasthan Royals. Both teams were very close to qualifying for the playoffs last year but neither of them was able to do so. They would want to change that this year for sure. Read the summary of the match here on Tuesday morning.
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