It pays to fight back. At least that is the message Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the CSK captain, seemed to be telling after his exemplary performance with the bat while his bowlers broke KKR’s dream start in front of their home crowds.
The 2010 IPL 3 gave the Kolkata Knight Riders their first humiliating defeat. After two uproarious wins, the KKR team came down with a thud in their home match against the Chennai Super Kings.
The Chennai Super Kings, for their part, needed a win under their belt after their match defeat against the Deccan Chargers and it could not have come in more inspiring fashion.
Chennai made the bold decision to bat first, a rarity in the Twenty20 format, but the decision seemed to blow up in their face. The batsmen struggled to come to terms with the surface and at one point, Chennai would have felt grateful even to get past 120.
But that was made possible once Dhoni got to the crease even as wickets were going down, time was running out and there were not enough runs on the board.
From 3 for 55, if the match turned around in the favor of the Chennai Super Kings, it was because of the steady hand of Dhoni, who did not choose to bring his ferocity to the table until the final five overs and then, even Shane Bond could not escape the brutal assault. It was a slow paced run scoring scenario for three fourths of the innings, as it appearing that the Chennai team was wilting even before the contests were getting stronger.
But the 100 plus run partnership with Subramaniam Badrinath changed the match significantly to give the Super Kings something to cheer about. From nurdling the bowling, they upped the ante to take sixty-eight runs off the final five overs, Dhoni himself scoring a thirty-three balls sixty-six unbeaten runs while Badrinath made forty-three, this after Murali Vijay, opening the batting, tried his best with thirty-three.
Chasing 164, the Kolkata Knight Riders, who started as hot favourites in the beginning of the match with the better part of the cricket world falling for the idea that they were on a comeback trail, did not have words to describe their flop show. At fifty-five for five, there was not much hope.
But for the Chennai Super Kings, there was hope aplenty as all their bowlers seemed to deliver, conceding fewer runs and weakening the opponent by taking wickets.
Albie Morkel sent back the man in form, Brad Hodge while Manpreet Gony got his own back when he had Manoj Tiwary by uprooting his offstump after Tiwary was opening up. Laxmipathy Balaji stopped Owais Shah and Wriddhiman Saha in his tracks.
But it was Justin Kemp that proved to be the surprise package of the day. He picked up Sourav Ganguly going for glory, and almost had another wicket had Dhoni held on. But that did not stop him from hunting again. He had the dangerous Angelo Matthews lbw and didn’t allow Rohan Gavaskar to get a look in.
Three wickets conceding just twelve runs was not a bad scorecard for a man who had virtually stopped bowling due to a bad back. The scorecard for the KKR team though was so paltry, it was not even worth looking at. Muttiah Muralitharan and Ravichandran Ashwin chipped in handily with their spin as well.
While Chennai romped up with a solid win by fifty-five runs, Shah Rukh Khan’s men need to quickly put this disaster behind them if they are to recapture their monumental start.
