Sunday 8 May 2011

A mis-match at Eden Gardens

Well what can be said about the shortest version of the game being truncated to half of its size and that too when one innings happens to be over? One has to forget the saying that all is well that ends well when the Chennai Superkings who would have lost otherwise as well happened to gain sympathy for ending up on the losing side due to the D-L method. A score of 115 on the board can hardly be defended and has been proved to be chased down on majority of the occasions. And, Kolkata is an upcoming team in this year's IPL.

There was an approach as though it was a one day game if the scorecard of the Chennai Superkings is considered. Neither did they lose wickets at regular intervals nor did they put up a huge score on the board to compensate for their ducking. There was one player in the Chennai side who scored a half century when Subramanium Badrinath scored a 41 ball 54 aided with three hits to the fence and two outside the ground. Had there been losses of wickets, that would have seen Dhoni getting into the rescue act followed by Wriddhiman Saha and Morkel.

Very rarely does a match total happens to be reduced to exactly half both in terms of the runs needed to be chased as well as the number of balls needed to secure a win. Yesterday, at Kolkata, the revised target for the Knight Riders happened to be 52 runs from 10 overs which initially was 115 runs from 20 overs. A funny aspect of the D-L method is that the team batting second wins by so many runs which is not possible in regular games or uninterrupted ones. The result might have been Kolkata won the game by 10 wickets instead of 10 runs.

Iqbal Abdulla was awarded the man of the match for his outstanding efforts of 1/15 from 4 overs by blind people who could not see or realize Brett Lee's efforts of 0/8 off his four overs at just 2 runs an over. Even in that partly total of 114, there was a bowler in Jaidev Unadkat who gave away runs at the rate of 11 runs an over from the only over which he bowled. The Kolkata Knight Riders innings saw no sixes being scored unlike the Chennai innings which saw two of them. Had Badrinath been adjudged the man of the match, that would not have been a bad choice.

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