Kolkata Knight Riders 114 for 2 (Venkatesh 52*, Gurbaz 39) beat Sunrisers Hyderabad 113 (Cummins 24, Russell 3-19, Starc 2-14) by eight wickets
Five of the six bowlers used by KKR took a wicket in their first over, including a golden duck for SRH’s talisman Travis Head to Vaibhav Arora in the second over. It is hard to find fault with SRH who had to take risks while KKR’s strategy was straightforward: with the ball moving, just minimise the bad balls and experiment less. Whenever SRH looked to force the pace, they ended up losing wickets.
Scintillating Starc
Starc didn’t quite start the tournament the way he would have wanted after becoming the costliest player in IPL history, but he turned up for the playoffs all right. The first ball of the match swung away to beat Abhishek Sharma, who was taking first strike after Starc bowled Head second ball in the Qualifier 1. By the end of the over, Starc had worked himself into enough of a rhythm to pitch the ball on leg and hit the top of off. It was an unplayable delivery at Starc’s pace. You could forgive Abhishek for not lunging forward because it was pitched on a good length and the movement was late.
Head got on strike only last ball of the second over, which is when Arora started on a good length outside leg, and swung and seamed it to finish just outside the top of off. Head pushed at it, edged, and was caught behind.
While Arora mixed up his inswing with various-paced short balls, Starc kept using the scrambled-seam ball to threaten both the edges. One outside edge flew wide of slip, before Rahul Tripathi fell off a top edge as he tried to push back.
Rana starts the second slide
Seeing how the ball was moving, KKR used just the two bowlers in the powerplay, but Arora went for 17 in the final powerplay over, taking SRH up to 40 for 3. That seemed like a situation from which SRH could salvage the game, especially with an Impact Player up their sleeve.
It wasn’t to be. In his first over, Harshit Rana bowled three straight slower balls before bowling the hard length at 146kmph and managing seam movement against the angle. Nitish Reddy had no choice but to go after it, and all he managed was an edge through to the keeper.
Aiden Markram and Heinrich Klaasen were now SRH’s last hope really. They batted cautiously together for three overs but when Markram tried to take Russell on, he found long-on. Soon after Varun Chakravarthy produced the wicket of Shahbaz Ahmed with a top edge on the sweep from well outside off.
In the next over, the Impact Player Abdul Samad gave Russell his 18th wicket of this IPL, the most he has taken in one edition. Rana came back to get Klaasen playing on to a slower ball. Russell would go on to add a 19th to his tally when ending the innings with Pat Cummins’ wicket in the 19th over.
Not before Cummins managed the top score to take SRH past 100.
The chase as one long celebration
Gurbaz hit boundaries post the powerplay, but didn’t have the benefit of a review because of a technology breakdown when given out lbw for 39. That only allowed captain Shreyas Iyer to be in the middle for the winning moment after a tough year for him in which he has lost his place in and retainer with the Indian national team.
Sidharth Monga is a senior writer at ESPNcricinfo
