IPL 2018 | Sunil Narine’s 16-ball fifty secures Kolkata Knight Riders a winning start

IPL 2018 | Sunil Narine’s 16-ball fifty secures Kolkata Knight Riders a winning start

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BCCI

Sunil Narine proved his batting prowess and his 16-ball 50 against Royal Challengers Bangalore today saw Kolkata Knight Riders scamper to a XX-wicket over the visitors. Earlier, Nitish Rana was the star of KKR’s bowling efforts, after dismissing AB de Villiers and Virat Kohli off consecutive balls.

Brief Scores: Royal Challengers Bangalore 176/7 ( AB de Villiers 44, Brendon McCullum 43; Nitish Rana 2/11, Vinay Kumar 2/30) lost to Kolkata Knight Riders 177/6 (Sunil Narine 50, Dinesh Karthik 35; Chris Woakes 3/36, Umesh Yadav 2/27) by four wickets

Dinesh Karthik opted to bowl first in the second match of IPL 2018 against Royal Challengers Bangalore, who chose Brendon McCullum, Quinton de Kock, AB de Villiers, and Chris Woakes as their overseas players. On the other hand, for the Knight Riders, as expected, Sunil Narine, Chris Lynn, Mitchell Johnson, and Andre Russell were the four overseas picks.

Nitish Rana’s twin strike dents RCB’s ambition of a big total

The Eden track was supposed to throw up a challenge or two to the batsmen, but when Brendon McCullum decides to go aerial, there is hardly anything that a team can do. Although Quinton de Kock failed to get going and got out for 4 to Piyush Chawla, Kohli stepped in and made sure that the team kept up the momentum in the game. On the other end, Baz played his natural game and before getting out for 43, he made sure that RCB were in a comfortable position of 63/2 in 8.2 overs. Soon after, the partnership between AB de Villiers and Kohli began to blossom and the duo started punishing the spinners. While Kohli was relatively sedate at one end, de Villiers took the role of the aggressor and the duo guided the team to 127 in 14.1 overs when Nitish Rana, of all the KKR’s bowling options, dismissed the destructive duo in back to back deliveries. The twin dismissal resulted in RCB losing the plot completely and only managed to post a total of 176/7 in the stipulated 20 overs, thanks to Mandeep Singh’s 37 off 18 balls. 

Calypso power guides KKR home

KKR, as expected, sent Sunil Nairne to open the innings with Chris Lynn and the spinner also lived upto the expectations and started the clubbing from the word go. But the team lost the wicket of Chris Lynn in the next over and Robin Uthappa had to hang in there to take the team to a good position. However, he became a sideshow in front of Narine’s batting as the team raced to 65 in 5 overs. The team was staring at an easy way out in that moment, but Umesh Yadav, returning to Eden with a different jersey, struck immediately to send Narine back to the pavilion. After Narine’s dismissal, the runs became very hard to come by, but the presence of Karthik and Rana kept KKR comfortably placed in the chase. While the duo tried their hard to take the team much close, the loss of Rana’s wicket slowed the game down even further. However, Andre Russell blitz towards the end sealed the game in the hosts’ favour and also dented RCB’s big hopes of getting off to a good start.

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