IPL 2017 | Kieron Pollard's heroics ruin Kohli’s comeback

04/14/2017

Kieron Pollard finally joined the action as he smashed a 47-ball 70 to secure a win for MI despite Samuel Badree’s hattrick, initially, restricting Mumbai to 7/4. Earlier in the day, Virat Kohli, making his season debut, ensured Bangalore reached a competitive total with a well made 62 off 47 balls.

Brief scores: Royal Challengers Bangalore 142/5 (Virat Kohli 62, Chris Gayle 22; Mitchell McClenaghan 2/20, Hardik Pandya 1/9) lost to Mumbai Indians 145/6 (Pollard 70, Pandya 37; Badree 4/9, Binny 1/9) by 4 wickets.

The Chinnaswamy was painted red by the RCB fans as Virat Kohli walked onto the field for the toss, but it was Rohit Sharma who emerged successful in the battle of luck as Mumbai Indians opted to field first. Apart from Kohli, Chris Gayle replaced Shane Watson while Samuel Badree came into the side for Billy Stanlake. Iqbal Abdulla was also sent down the pecking order as the team brought in local lad Sreenath Aravind to replace him. Vishnu Vinod had to make way for Kohli. Mumbai, too, brought Tim Southee back into the playing XI after Lasith Malinga was declared unwell.

Kohli shows RCB what they have been missing

In the last game against the Sunrisers, Harbhajan shared the new ball with Malinga and, today, Rohit Sharma, after winning the toss, adopted the same tactic and gave the new ball to Harbhajan with the intent to unsettle Chris Gayle. Harbhajan and Southee gave away only seven runs in the first two overs before Kohli used the bounce off the pitch to score two boundaries in Southee’s second over. With the possibility of dew being a big factor in the second half, Kohli and Gayle needed to step up to set a high target but Sharma made the right bowling and fielding changes to restrict the run scoring. The pressure got to Gayle as Hardik Pandya extracted a faint edge off the West Indian's blade to send him packing for 22 of 27 balls, continuing his run of poor form in IPL. At the midway point, Bangalore were struggling at 66/1.

Mumbai's death bowling exploits restrict RCB to 142

Bangalore’s struggles with the bat continued in the second half of their innings as well, with Kohli and de Villiers managing just 19 runs in three overs. But when you have players with the quality of the Indo-Protean duo at the crease, one can expect some fireworks. And they provided just that, scoring the same number of runs in the very next over. Just as it looked like Bangalore were readying to blow the battle horn, Kohli was dismissed while trying to hit a back of length delivery over the fence. All he could manage was the palms of Buttler at deep extra cover. It got worse for Bangalore as de Villiers fell in the next over and soon after, Kedar Jadhav was sent packing from a run-out on a free-hit ball. Over the last three overs, Bangalore could only muster 23 runs, setting Mumbai a below-par score of 143 to chase.

Samuel Badree leads Bangalore fightback

Knowing that they needed to score at a rate of just 7.2 runs an over, Mumbai began tentatively, scoring just four runs of the first Samuel Badree over. With striker bowler Tymal Mills warmed up, Kohli decided to go another way and handed the ball to Stuart Binny, who had bowled just one over in the previous three games. It proved to be the right decision as the 32-year-old picked up the wicket of Jos Buttler. But that was just the start of the Mumbai top order collapse. Samuel Badree picked up the first hattrick of the IPL as Parthiv Patel, Mitch McClenaghan, and Rohit Sharma were all dismissed under the spell of the West Indians’ magic. Nitish Rana, who has been Mumbai’s best batsman in the tournament, started the visitor’s recovery along with Kieron Pollard building a 26 run partnership but Badree came back and, on his last delivery, claimed the scalp of Rana as well to finish his spell at 4/9. Mumbai could only limp to 48/5 at the midway point of their innings as RCB smelt blood.

Pollard finally decides to show up for the IPL

Pollard, however, was staying put and started upping the runrate, scoring a boundary in every over, to keep the asking rate at around 10 runs an over. Kohli was forced to bring back Tymal Mills into the attack to break the partnership, that was looking threatening, but even the Englishman ended up conceding 11 runs in his over. Needing 52 runs off five overs, Kieron Pollard went into attack mode smashing Pawan Negi for 19 runs with four overs to go. The big West Indian followed that up with a 10-run over off Arvind to bring the required runrate down to just 7.66. Kohli turned to his most reliable bowler, Yuzvendra Chahal, to get his team back into the game. Even though the 26-year-old picked up the all-important wicket of Pollard, it was too little too late as Mumbai secured the win with 7 balls to spare.