IPL 2019 | Power outrage broke my momentum, reveals Nitish Rana

03/25/2019

IPL

Kolkata Knight Riders batsman Nitish Rana has blamed the abrupt floodlight failure at the Eden Gardens, which caused him to lose his momentum at a crucial juncture. Power failure, however, isn’t a new phenomenon at the Eden Gardens as it had also seen a match of World Cup 2016 being halted for it.

KKR’s opening IPL match at the Eden Gardens on Sunday saw a 12-minute halt during the second innings when one of floodlights had tripped following a short circuit. It was during the 16th over when Rana was at the striker’s end facing Rashid Khan and had already dispatched the Afghanistan spinner for a boundary on the very first ball.

When KKR returned to the crease after the pause, Rana was caught LBW on the very first ball itself as he failed to deal with the slower leg-break delivery. Making 68 runs off 47, Rana looked to be the right opening decision by KKR, who had to let the batsman start after Sunil Narine suffered a finger injury. However, Rana couldn’t get closure despite his good innings and blamed the power outage for it.

“I didn’t know this could happen. My gameplan suddenly got interrupted. I lost my momentum when I came to the dressing room. The atmosphere also became a bit relaxed. I got into the shell because of the break. I could have finished the match if the break was not there,” Rana said at the post-match press conference, reported Sportstar.

Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) joint-secretary Avishek Dalmiya termed the incident an “eventuality“ after the match. “It’s not a glitch actually. It was an eventuality which got rectified,” Dalmiya has said PTI.

As per the official statement from the agency, which controls the operation of the match, a short circuit had happened in the E-Block Tower that led to the 12-minute pause. “There are 131 contactors in E-Block Tower for switching on 131 M Halide Lamps. Unfortunately contactor bearing No. 1-8 of Phase RB-1 got short circuited due to chance cause, which tripped the MCB system resulting in tripping of few lamps,” the statement said.

“The matter was identified and corrective action was taken immediately thereby the system came back to normalcy,” it added.

Interestingly, power outage has been quite common in the iconic stadium and Rana, for all his form, actually should have taken into account. Previously, a match between New Zealand and Bangladesh in the World Twenty20 in 2016 was paused due to power failure. Prior to that, the fourth ODI between India and Sri Lanka on December 24, 2009 had seen a similar thing, when the match was delayed by 23 minutes. The 2008 match between in 2008 between Deccan Chargers and KKR also saw the same.

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