New Delhi: It has been a while since the world has seen Krunal Pandya the allrounder, flourishing. On Sunday evening, on a pitch designed to help the three Delhi Capitals spinners, he brought out his A game that once saw him make the Indian team.
He backed up his bowling spell of 1/28 with a tenacious unbeaten 73 off 47 to help Royal Challengers Bengaluru chase down 163 with six wickets and nine balls to spare here. At 26/3 in the first four overs of the chase, Capitals would have felt their plan to play on sluggish pitch was working to a nicety.
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Then Krunal and Kohli happened. With the master of chasing moderately high totals holding one end, Krunal maintained his composure even as he looked clueless for the first 25 balls of his innings. It took two crisply-times sixes -- one off the backfoot over fine-leg and one down the ground over long-off -- off Mukesh Kumar to open the floodgates for RCB.
Even if RCB weren’t running away with the game, Capitals were never breathing easy with Kohli milking the bowling and Krunal going about finding the fence at regular intervals. When Kohli finally fell for 51 off 47, trying to hit his first six of the innings, the score was 145 in the 18th over. The duo had set the stage for Tim David to knock off the remaining runs.
It was clear RCB had targeted Mukesh Kumar -- the least potent option for skipper Axar Patel. And they ended up scoring 51 off his 3.3 overs. Earlier, Capitals played out a strange innings by current IPL standards. Had it not been for Abhishek Porel ’s fluent 11-ball 28 at the top of the innings and Tristan Stubbs clubbing 34 off 18 at the back end, the score would have looked worse than 162/8. It was strange on two counts.
Firstly, the Capitals management has been yearning for slower tracks at the Kotla. Secondly, their middleorder has largely struggled the most on their home track. Much was expected of KL Rahul to regulate the pace of the innings once Capitals got off to a flyer through Porel.
The Capitals batters who batted between Porel and Stubbs struggled to maintain a strike-rate of 100 for most part of their knocks, Rahul being at the centre of it. Rahul’s 41 off 39 balls seemed even more bizarre as he struggled to find his new-found power-hitting form for nearly an hour at the crease.
Eventually, it turned out that the RCB bowling assessed the pitch conditions better in the first half of the match. The spin duo of Suyash Sharma and Krunal are fast emerging as one of the more dependable pairings this season with figures of 0/22 and 1/28 in their four-over spells. Josh Hazlewood and Bhuvneshwar Kumar laid out the template for pacers bowling on this pitch returning figures 2/36 and 3/33.
He backed up his bowling spell of 1/28 with a tenacious unbeaten 73 off 47 to help Royal Challengers Bengaluru chase down 163 with six wickets and nine balls to spare here. At 26/3 in the first four overs of the chase, Capitals would have felt their plan to play on sluggish pitch was working to a nicety.
Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel.
Then Krunal and Kohli happened. With the master of chasing moderately high totals holding one end, Krunal maintained his composure even as he looked clueless for the first 25 balls of his innings. It took two crisply-times sixes -- one off the backfoot over fine-leg and one down the ground over long-off -- off Mukesh Kumar to open the floodgates for RCB.
Even if RCB weren’t running away with the game, Capitals were never breathing easy with Kohli milking the bowling and Krunal going about finding the fence at regular intervals. When Kohli finally fell for 51 off 47, trying to hit his first six of the innings, the score was 145 in the 18th over. The duo had set the stage for Tim David to knock off the remaining runs.
It was clear RCB had targeted Mukesh Kumar -- the least potent option for skipper Axar Patel. And they ended up scoring 51 off his 3.3 overs. Earlier, Capitals played out a strange innings by current IPL standards. Had it not been for Abhishek Porel ’s fluent 11-ball 28 at the top of the innings and Tristan Stubbs clubbing 34 off 18 at the back end, the score would have looked worse than 162/8. It was strange on two counts.
Firstly, the Capitals management has been yearning for slower tracks at the Kotla. Secondly, their middleorder has largely struggled the most on their home track. Much was expected of KL Rahul to regulate the pace of the innings once Capitals got off to a flyer through Porel.
The Capitals batters who batted between Porel and Stubbs struggled to maintain a strike-rate of 100 for most part of their knocks, Rahul being at the centre of it. Rahul’s 41 off 39 balls seemed even more bizarre as he struggled to find his new-found power-hitting form for nearly an hour at the crease.
Eventually, it turned out that the RCB bowling assessed the pitch conditions better in the first half of the match. The spin duo of Suyash Sharma and Krunal are fast emerging as one of the more dependable pairings this season with figures of 0/22 and 1/28 in their four-over spells. Josh Hazlewood and Bhuvneshwar Kumar laid out the template for pacers bowling on this pitch returning figures 2/36 and 3/33.
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