Yesterday saw Chennai Super Kings entertaining Royal Challengers Bangalore. The winner of this match would be the first team to start the season with two straight wins.
THE RCB INNINGS
This innings was not unblemished by either side. For RCB Rajat Patidar made a fine 50, and openers Salt and Kohli scored utterly dissimilar low 30s – Salt’s 32 came off 16 balls and thus represented a job well done, while Kohli’s 31 came off 30 balls, which is unacceptably slow in IPL cricket. Each side perpetrated (IMO) a blunder – RCB held their Singapore/ Australia star batter Tim David back for so long that he only got to face eight balls in the entire innings, off which he scored an unbeaten 22 and CSK ended up giving the 20th over to Sam Curran, and irrespective of bowling resources available having the left arm medium pacer bowl the last over of a T20 innings represents a mishandling of those resources. The over in question was plundered for 20 runs, boosting RCB to 196-7 from their 20 overs.
THE CSK REPLY
CSK started poorly losing three wickets almost before they had got going. Curran, fresh from his less than impressive efforts with the ball came in at number five. He never got going at all, and had scored 8 off 12 balls when he attempted to give the 13th ball of his innings, an absolute pie from another English all rounder, Liam Livingstone, the treatment it deserved but succeeded only in picking out Krunal Pandya in the deep to make it 52-4. At this point ‘Impact Player’ Shivam Dube came in. He reached 19 fairly impressively before being bowled by a very good ball from Yash Dayal. It was at this stage that CSK mucked up their batting line up. Mahendra Singh Dhoni, a legend of the game but now 43 years old and well past his best should have been in at this point, but determined to hold him back for the very final stages of the innings no matter what, CSK sent Ravindra Jadeja in at seven, and then even more bizarrely R Ashwin at eight, before finally having the keeper/ batter come in at nine. Dhoni actually did bat impressively once sent in, but while his 30* (16) would have been ample had his team mates matched his scoring rate CSK had fallen so far behind that all it did was reduce the margin of defeat somewhat, to a still fairly hefty 50 runs. Josh Hazlewood for RCB, in a match in which not many bowlers would have been overly eager to find out their exact figures had 4-0-21-3 to show for his own efforts, and he bowled every bit as well as those figures suggest, though Patidar was named Player of the Match.
PHOTOGRAPHS
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