Kings XI Punjab won the match against Kolkata Knight Riders in Indian Premiere League 2014 by 23 runs at Abu Dhabi. It was completely a bowler’s match, as both the teams managed to score only 332 runs for the loss of 33 wickets.
Earlier in the match KKR captain Gautam Gambhir won the toss and elected to field first. His bowlers responded quite well to the captain’s call, Kings XI Punjab batsmen never looked comfortable in front of KKR’s Morne Morkel, Piyush Chawla and Sunil Narine.
KXIP opening batsman Cheteshwar Puja (8 runs, 8 balls) got run out early in the innings due to smart piece of work from agile Manish Pandey. The other opener Virender Sehwag (37 runs, 30 balls) played well, but it wasn’t like the ‘old Sehwag style’. Even the star duo of KXIP Glen Maxwell (15 runs, 12 balls) and David Miller (14 runs, 10 balls) failed to deliver in this match due to smart bowling by KKR. Rishi Dhawan smashed two boundaries and made 19 runs from 18 balls at the back end of the innings. Thus finally KXIP managed to accumulate 132/9 from 20 overs.
Both the spinners of KKR team, Piyush Chawla and Sunil Narine took 3 wickets each and the South African duo Morne Morkel and Jacques Kallis had taken 1 wicket each. Almost all the bowlers of KKR bowled quite economically and restricted KXIP in such a short total.
While chasing such a small total what needed was stability in batting but KKR batsmen managed to produce that. None of their top order batsmen managed to apply the required method to chase that total successfully. They lost their opening batsmen Manish Pandey (8 runs from 10 balls) and Jacques Kallis (9 runs, 11 balls) early, and the skipper Gautam Gambhir (1 run, 5 balls) himself again threw his wicket in a bad manner.
Chris Lynn (13 runs, 18 balls) and Robin Uthappa (19 runs, 27 balls) got the start but failed to convert it to big innings and helped team to seal the game. Yusuf Pathan failed to perform yet again, and honestly KKR team management needed to take a strong decision about him now. The young Surya Kumar Yadav tried his level best and scored a quick fire 34 runs from just 17 balls. But he couldn’t be able to end the game for his team. Finally KKR was all out for 109 after 18.2 overs.
Sandeep Sharma was the star performer for KXIP for his bowling figure of 4-1-21-3. Mitchel Johnson and Aksar Patel took 2 wickets each, and the other 2 wickets were shared by Balaji and Dhawan. It was a majestic bowling display by the KXIP bowling unit which helped the team to seal the 4th consecutive victories in the tournament.
Sandeep Sharma was chosen as the Man of the Match for this game because of his amazing bowling performance. The Punjab team now got the momentum and it should help them in the tournament.