Sunday 3 May 2009

KKR Never Turned Out To Be Another KIXI

If all of us are aware of, the match between the Mumbai Indians and the Kings XI Punjab, the Mumbai Indians came close to winning the match, first by bowling out the Kings XI Punjab for a low score of 119 and then lost out in close contest by losing all their ten wickets for a score that was four less than the actual target. I guess that this was the most disappointing of all matches in the IPL for such hard work never goes unpaid. That match showed the degree of bad luck the Mumbai Indians had on that particular day. However, this was not the case in their encounter against the Kolkata Knight Riders.

This was the second encounter of the Mumbai Indians with the Kolkata Knight Riders in this series, and much to their excitement, the Mumbai Indians have won both the matches, the first one by thrashing them and the second time in a close encounter by 9 runs. One can observe the bad timing of the schedule which saw the Mumbai Indians and the Kolkata Knight Riders face each other twice in a span of a week. When most other teams had not even completed their first round of games, these two teams out there were ready playing their second round.

Over to the match, it was the Kolkata Knight Riders who were more responsible for the loss rather than the Mumbai Indians who were rejoicing their win. For, the Kolkata Knight Riders were well within the limit by bowling 17 tight overs and the last three overs went out of control, which fetched the Kolkata Knight Riders 42 valuable runs and the KKR 42 steps to cover for a victory. Likewise, the batsmen of the Kolkata Knight Riders never took any sorts of risks, which could be well judged from the fact that they neither lost wickets nor did their batsmen go in for runs which is a bad sign. I wonder as to what is the use of such batsmen who never want to slog the bat despite the situation demanding it?

This has been observed many a times in this tournament. It looks like most of the batsmen out there were in the 50-50 mood. The Kolkata Knight Riders lost just 6 wickets with a score of 138. When the strike in a T20 game demands not less than 133 i.e 7 runs for every 6 balls faced, one can observe that most of the KKR batsmen had their strike rates less than hundred and despite that they scored single digit scores. A littkle bit of T20 thinking from the batsmen meaning a few lofts would have seen the Brad Hodge's effort yield his team some results for the KKRs. This is somewhat selfish I believe.

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