Brevis special downs KKR at Eden
Kolkata: CSK staged a thrilling comeback to beat KKR by two wickets, with Dewald Brevis scoring 52 runs and guiding the team to victory.
Kolkata: Thirty runs in one over from Vaibhav Arora was all it took Chennai Super Kings to stage a coup, beating Kolkata Knight Riders by two wickets after looking down and out at 60/5.
Dewald Brevis orchestrated this turnaround, blasting 52 in 25 balls and leaving MS Dhoni with a required run rate of 6.62. Clobbering a six off Andre Russell, he guided the win with two balls to spare, consigning KKR to another frustrating defeat at Eden Gardens that nearly put them on the brink in the race to the IPL playoffs.
Till the 11th over of the chase, KKR seemed to have the match in their grasp. CSK were keeping up with the asking rate thanks to Urvil Patel’s 11-ball 31 but having lost half the side and with Dhoni not exactly in blistering hitting form, a comprehensive win for KKR was on the cards. Brevis, however, had other ideas.
Angkrish Raghuvanshi probably didn’t judge a catch too well at long-on but once the ball had cleared the boundary, Brevis went all out. Two fours followed, and then two sixes—both off low full tosses—as Brevis punished Arora’s ordinary bowling. Raising his fifty with a boundary through extra cover, Brevis forced KKR to bring Sunil Narine back.
Narine conceded four runs in that over and first ball of the next over, Varun Chakravarthy got Brevis to hole out to Rinku Singh at long-on but by then the chase had been simplified too well for Dhoni. Equally vital was the innings Shivam Dube played, scoring a 40-ball 45 to ensure CSK didn’t suffer any major hiccup.
On a day players from both teams lined up for the national anthem in the backdrop of the giant screen reading: “Proud of the Indian Armed Forces” in the wake of Operation Sindoor and a bomb threat doing the rounds, the result proved to be an anticlimactic end to an eventful home phase for KKR where the pitch didn’t always go their way.
Barring a four-wicket haul from Noor Ahmad and measured bowling from Ravichandran Ashwin — who didn’t complete his quota despite conceding 19 runs in three overs — CSK barely made an impression on what was also easily one of the most spin-friendly surfaces so far. Till Ahmad was given the ball, KKR were looking unstoppable as Narine and Ajinkya Rahane took KKR to 67/1 after the Powerplay.
With pacers slowly getting the hang of the lines to frustrate Narine, onus was on him to explore alternate ways of scoring. He got that against Ravichandran Ashwin, flicking him through square-leg for a four before playing with the spin and squeezing out another boundary. Exquisite however was the six off Ashwin, Narine staying on his backfoot and thumping a marginally short delivery over the bowler’s head for six.
At the other end, Rahane was in flowing form after a diving Matheesha Pathirana put him down at long leg. Opening his innings with a streaky four off Anshul Kamboj, Rahane warmed up to his task by whipping Khaleel Ahmed wide of long-on for a boundary. Dropped by Pathirana, Rahane switched gears and attacked Kamboj again, taking 10 runs off the first two deliveries in the sixth over.
Once the field was spread though, KKR’s innings slowed down. Ashwin conceded only two runs, and then both Narine and Angkrish Raghuvanshi fell to Ahmad in the eighth over. That brought Manish Pandey, subbed in for the injured Venkatesh Iyer, as Rahane repaired the innings with a 32-run stand with him. Russell was again sent ahead of Rinku Singh, and it was his 21-ball 38 that helped KKR aggregate 70 in their last six overs.
