Thursday 14 April 2011

A perfect T20 game

Well, when all of us were cursing regarding the tournament being as dull as it can get with the very first encounter being a close encounter with Chennai Super Kings drawing it towards them by just two runs, here was a treat for all those action crazy fans who could see a score of 188 being chased. The run rate was well above the landmark of 9.0 an over. I just can't remember when last was a mammoth score chased down in a T20 game-be it in the IPL or international cricket. But, speaking latest, the Kings XI Punjab have done it.

And, with a team like the Kings XI Punjab doing it against a defending champions-Chennai Super Kings should add another boost to the Kings XI cap who are now without their flop captain-Yuvraj Singh. The team is now headed by the player who took his team to victory in the 2009 edition at South Africa. The player is none other than Adam Gilchrist who was also awarded the man of the match and was instrumental in bringing his team from number 7 position to position 1 in that year's IPL. Yesterday, it was no Gilchrist who did the show with his bat.

Instead, the batsman could manage only 19 runs which should not matter when there was some Paul Valthaty who scored the tournament's maiden century when he ended his individual score at 120 off 63 balls. If I have to use the word "fastest" of a "quickfire" innings, that would suit only for the one day format and not regarding the T20 format. There have been repeated scores of 100 runs off 40 and 50 balls in one edition itself. If at all some bad performances are to be spoken about, then we have Anirudh from the Chennai Super Kings and Abhishek Nayar from Punjab both who got out without scoring.

Both teams lost just four wickets and, if team work needs to be spoken about, then one has to give full marks to the Chennai Super Kings with three of the four batsmen scoring decent scores compared to only one from the Kings XI Punjab. If not for Paul Valthaty, no other batsman really stood upto the challenge.The remaining scores read 20, 21, 12 and 19 from Sunny Singh, Dinesh Karthik, Adam Gilchrist and Shaun Marsh respectively. Vaklthaty's score accounted upto 60% of the total of Punjab's score of 193. The highlight of the match was that a six was scored off the winning ball from Dinesh Karthik.

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