Kolkata Knight Riders is one more step closer to play-offs as they played brilliant cricket to outrun Chennai Super Kings at their home ground Eden Gardens, Kolkata, by 8 wickets in front of 65000 people. Early in the match KKR won the toss and they decided to chase the run again as they sent CSK to bat first in a grassy pitch of Eden. Kolkata made a new addition to their team as Pat Cummins played in the game in place of Morne Morkel and he dished out a dream delivery for any first bowler to take the danger man Dwayne Smith out. However, Brendon McCullum and Suresh Raina made a decent partnership after that, but the key man for KKR Sunil Narine broke the partnership in the right time by taking the wicket of Brendon (28 of 24 balls).
Suresh Raina played almost till the end as he scored 65 runs of 52 balls and also played his part beautifully to make another strong partnership with Faf du Plessis (23 of 20 balls). Anyway, MS Dhoni (C) (W) and Ravindra Jadeja also scored some runs in the back end of CSK’s innings, but that wasn’t enough to break the winning streak of KKR as they won their 5th consistent match in IPL 7.
Pat Cummins, Sunil Narine and Piyush Chawla claimed one wicket each. But Chawla was so expensive in the match as he conceded 42 runs in his allotted 4 overs.
Kolkata is probably the best team in chasing the runs as they did it again for the 5th consistent time in IPL 7, they chased 155 runs with two overs to spare. Once again KKR made a strong opening partnership with the magnificent duo, Robin Uthappa (W) and Gautam Gambhir (C). Robin scored 67 runs in just 39 balls to get the Man of the Match award. Double G went back to pavilion by scoring 21 runs in 20 balls.
The real drama was started in the match right in the time when Shakib Al Hasan came to the ground with the bat, he played his innings with no respect to the bowlers as he scored 46 runs in just 21 balls with the strike rate of 219.05, undoubtedly one of his best innings in the IPL. Manish Pandey just supported Shakib with his 18 runs of innings but he took 28 balls to make those runs, but that was not a problem for KKR as the Bangladeshi all rounder assaulted the bowlers of CSK on the other side to win the 100th match of KKR in IPL.
CSK boys also dropped couple of catches of Robin Uthappa in the slip and that is the turning point for KKR. Ishwar Pandey and Ravindra Jadeja shared 2 wickets equally against Kolkata. Yes Bank Maximum Sixes award was given to Suresh Raina for 5 sixes and Kanna Keep Calm award was given to Shakib Al Hasan for his outstanding innings