Miracles can’t happen every day. Once again set a target of over 200, this time Kolkata Knight Riders’ innings almost came apart before Nitish Rana and Rinku Singh raised hopes with a fighting stand that kept them in contention longer than expected. They finally lost by 23 runs but what the 60,000-odd spectators also got to witness was this IPL’s first hundred, from a man who is rewriting cricket manuals with centuries across formats. This wasn’t as emphatic an IPL arrival as expected from Harry Brook but it was nevertheless a crash course in how to pace a T20 innings when spinners are making run-scoring difficult.
Quite expectedly, Brook feeds off pace and struggles against spin. But he also manages to strike a balance. By the end of his innings, Brook had hit 66 off 26 balls from pacers, laced with nine fours and three sixes that fetched him a stunning strike rate of 253.84. Against spin, he managed just three fours in 29 balls, mustering just 34 runs at a strike rate of 117.24. Had Suyash Suyash not dropped a waist-high dolly from Brook when he was on 45, this game would have probably gone off on a different trajectory but Brook made best use of that reprieve to carve a strange hundred.
This is how Brooks went about scoring his hundred: By the third over, Brook was on 31 off 11 balls and SRH on 43/0. Three more overs of spin and he was on 39 off 17. By the 10th, he was on 49 off 31. Sunil Narine was in element by then, bowling lines and lengths that make him one of the most economical T20 bowlers of all time. Andre Russell had also removed Mayank Agarwal and Rahul Tripathi, bringing Hyderabad’s run machine to a grinding halt. But Brook bided his time, trying to nudge around KKR’s spinners waiting for the pacers to be restored to the attack.
KKR had to go back to pace, more because of the way Suyash was clobbered out of the attack, especially by SRH captain Aiden Markram who hit three sixes in the space of four balls spread across two overs. With Ferguson again clocking above 140 kph, Brook was once again back in business. From 55 off 36 balls, he raced to 77 off 43 after clobbering Ferguson for 6, 4, 4, 4 in the 15th over. Two more overs and Brook was on 84 off 47 and his strike rate plateauing near 180. Starting with over 300, Brook finally ended with a strike rate of 181.81.
{{/usCountry}}KKR had to go back to pace, more because of the way Suyash was clobbered out of the attack, especially by SRH captain Aiden Markram who hit three sixes in the space of four balls spread across two overs. With Ferguson again clocking above 140 kph, Brook was once again back in business. From 55 off 36 balls, he raced to 77 off 43 after clobbering Ferguson for 6, 4, 4, 4 in the 15th over. Two more overs and Brook was on 84 off 47 and his strike rate plateauing near 180. Starting with over 300, Brook finally ended with a strike rate of 181.81.
{{/usCountry}}What was remarkable about Sunrisers Hyderabad’s innings though was that it wasn’t affected by Brook’s sliding strike rate in the middle overs. Markram came out to play a blistering 26-ball 50 right when the innings was going into a lull, resuscitating it for Abhishek Sharma who followed that up with an equally breezy 17-ball 32. Only two batters scored fifty or more but if strike rates are the real markers of a team’s health, then SRH were ticking all the boxes.
It would have required something really special from KKR to match up to this mayhem. A first-ball wicket in the form of Rahmanullah Gurbaz followed by a double wicket over where they lost Venkatesh Iyer and Sunil Narine and KKR were quickly looking down the barrel. But Rana reignited hope, hitting Umran Malik for 4,6,4,4,4,6 in his first over before targeting Marco Jansen and Washington Sundar.
A 62-run partnership, followed by a 71 with Rinku after being dropped on 68, and Rana had almost turned around the match till he was caught at sweeper cover. Once again KKR were faced with a near-impossible ask of 32 from six balls. But this time, there were no last-ball heroics.