Posted on May 27, 2024
As things turned out, Pat Cummins’ realistic assessment, made when Stand-in Captain of KKR in the lead-up to very final that his run of success in the title role was bound to come to an end, proved tragically apposite as Sunrisers Hyderabad signed off in the most lackluster fashion possible against Kolkata Knight Riders in the IPL final in the M. A. Chidambaram Stadium on Sunday.
Still, Cummins led the fight back, giving 19-ball 24 to help his team a total of 113 while defending the title, Knight Riders thrashed to their third IPL crown, eight wickets remaining while 57 balls unused after bundling Sunrisers to the below par IPL final score.
AS IT HAPPENED: Indian premier league final match that is KKR vs SRH.
This was because the rudimentary organisations of festivities for the put up entertaining season ending match was complemented by the public address system incantations for the fans to cheer and make it a memorable climax to the season, and which fell on deaf ears.
The winning moment was as much a dampener as half-centurion Venkatesh Iyer: with his skipper Shreyas Iyer at the other end, stole a single with a miscued paddle sweep to get his team home in a straightforward chase.
As ‘We Are The Champions’ from Queen played in the background along with the celebrations of the victorious team the Umbrella and ‘Gautam bhaiya’ Iyer’s image was incomplete without picturing him belting out ‘I’ve paid my dues/Time after time/I’ve done my sentence/But committed no crime’ any time.
However, for a change Chepauk was not yellow as fans of the Orange army painted the seats with an hour to most likely plan the toss before the crowd erupted into a blend of orange and purple. But from being one of the batsman’s most dreaded team, E Proud vanished from the scene and its batsmen turned out to be all out for 113 in 18. 3 overs’ session was also not an easy for Sunrisers.
Mitchell Starc’s timely return into the mix saw him challenge Abhishek Sharma for the top of the stumps, levelling the pitch to make it come straight into the batsman and hit the off-stump in the first over. In the following over, Abhishek’s marauding partner Travis Head further worsened his position when he was caught plumb in front for a third duck in fourth innings.
When Rahul Tripathi got a top edge off Starc to the square-leg fielder in the fifth over, KKR had brought the expansion of SRH’s ballistic top-order PowerPlay healthy again after the week. In Qualifier 1, Hyderabad had 68/4 after six overs before striking big. But, on Sunday during the face-off, only the hurried stroke play from Nicolas Aiden Markram and Nitish Kumar Reddy in the last over of the mandatory PowerPlay managed to yield forty runs in the initial six overs.
But there was trouble in trophy retaining as Hyderabad to 46 runs short of the total it had made against Knight Riders in the mid of the week.
However, the recovery never arrived as the twin strengths of Harshit Rana and Andre Russell in the middle overs surfaced as the two bothered the batsmen with short pitched deliveries and rearranged their field with lorries taking off the pace and making it heavy in Nitish Rana by switching after three slower balls going pace on and full thus befuddling the dangerous Heinrich Klaasen to a terrible 17-ball 16 with an off cutter.
Russell used it to create a scoop shot from Markram which he failed to get it right and was taken mid-on and then Russell got Impact Player Abdul Samad and Cummins out when he went full.
It was the wicket-taker spin bowling duo of Sunil Narine and Varun Chakravarthy who bowled a tight spell and trying to give away as many as runs as they could bagging 2 wickets by leaking only 25 runs.
Still, establishing a clear air in a pressure cooker of a decider is-over and that’s where Starc floated.
Starc drew flak for an awful season and an obnoxiously expensive price before his resurrection was the most spectacular when he reduced the competition to mere mortals by producing a whirlwind PowerPlay before being awarded the Player-of-the-Match.
He had to abandon his Aussie bowling partner Cummins at the long-on boundary and if someone thought that one could be forgiven for coming to assist a mate in trouble, then Starc however, would have had absolutely none of such sentiments. He clung to a catch despite the rope and hanged in the same way to send his teammate back.
Starc and Cummins had made their debut as primary fast bowlers for their respective teams and the fiercest rivalry of the world cup had set aside friendly relations for the bigger game.