Kolkata Knight Rider’s much talked about batting line-up came as a cropper with their defeat in the opening encounter to the formidable Mumbai Indians in the 13th edition of IPL by a margin of 49 runs on Wednesday.
This is the first victory by MI in the UAE after they suffered six defeats since the IPL edition of 2014.
Rohit Sharma gets charged up and his eyes lit up when seeing KKR. Be it the Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi of Eden Gardens in Kolkata the love affair of MI captain’s continue as he came up with a brilliant 80 in just 54 balls that had six sixes and three boundaries and helped his side amass a score of 195 for the loss of 5 wickets.
The foundation for a big inning has been laid out by Rohit Sharma along with Suryakumar Yadav as for the second wicket, they added 90 runs after KKR won the toss they were put in to bat by Dinesh Karthik.
The middle order of MI failed to capitalize on the good start they got but to keep matters tight, their bowlers did very well right from the word go and the rivals were restricted to 146 for the loss of nine wickets.
All of the KKR batsmen failed and could not get going and when Bumrah bowled out Andre Russell for only 11 runs, their only hope faded.
A great comeback was made by the pacer after he went for 43 runs in the previous match and finished with figures of two for 32.
But the strike bowler for KKR, Pat Cummins, gave away 49 runs in the three overs that he bowled as a big difference is made in the final results.
Against CSK, Rohit was not getting his timings right in the first encounter in IPL and was looking very slow while running between the wickets but showed touches of his old self as MI was taken to a position of strength by him almost single-handedly.
On Wednesday, the opener Rohit has hit 200 sixes in IPL and is only in the second position to none other than Indian batsmen MS Dhoni.
MI would have got much more on the board but ended up getting less because of the spin duo of KKR, Kuldeep Yadav, and Sunil Narine.
The combination of left-hand and right-hand kept the matters tight in the middle over when Suryakumar and Rohit were going great guns.
Six wickets were claimed by Narine in the Caribbean League (CPL) that concluded recently and he took just one wicket by giving away 22 runs from his stipulated 4 over as Kuldeep conceded 39 runs without any wicket.
Good support was given to Rohit by the former Knight Suryakumar who scored 47 of 28 balls before he was run out. Rohit played some of the best shots before perishing to Mavi and caught by Cummins.
