Kolkata Knight Riders could see some flashes of brilliance from Andre Russell before they succumbed to their second consecutive loss of this edition of IPL against Royal Challengers Bangalore in Chennai on Sunday.
Batting first, RCB piled up a mammoth total of 204-4 in the stipulated 20 overs. Glenn Maxwell’s 78 off 49 balls and Ab de Villiers’ 76* off 34 balls led RCB to post their first 200+ score this season. KKR finished on 166-8, 38 runs short of the target.
Kolkata, in response, started their chase with some blitz from Shubman Gill (21 off 9 balls) but once he got out, wickets kept falling in regular intervals.
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Be it Nitish Rana (18 off 11 balls), Rahul Tripathi (25 off 20 balls) or captain Eoin Morgan (29 off 23 balls), there were many starts but none of them converted into a big score. The highest partnership of 41 off 25 balls came from Shakib Al Hasan (26 off 25 balls) and Russell (31 off 20 balls) towards the fag end of the match.
There was a time when Russell was going all guns blazing. He was on 30 runs from 13 balls when Shakib got out and even though Pat Cummins started off with a six, he perished the very next ball to Kyle Jamieson.
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The required run rate kept shooting up and KKR were left to chase 44 runs off the last two overs. Md Siraj bowled a brilliant second last over, executing the wide yorkers well, which thwarted Russell’s big swings and choked the run chase.
KKR will now head to Mumbai to play their next two matches against Chennai (April 21) and Rajasthan (April 24) respectively.
