South Australia just unpredictable

Last time when South Australia played their match against Warriors, on one hand South Australians were first punched everywhere when by the Warriors' batsmen for 171 and then their batsmen were restricted to just 121. Now, the same South Australian team happened to score a mammoth total of 188 against the Kolkata Knight Riders at Hyderabad yesterday. There can hardly be any question of a team chasing the total and needless to be said, Kolkata lost the match by 19 runs. Well, that was too low a margin to achieve victory. The margin of victory should have been atleast 51 runs like it was the case for Warriors.

Whatever, I am not the person to predict or rather dictate that by how much margin should a team win a match. Coming to the match, it was not a one man show like it was in the match between Warriors and South Australia where all most of the scoring was done by JJ Smuts who scored 88. This time there was contribution from Michael Klinger, Daniel Harris, Callum Ferguson and Daniel Christian with Ferguson's 70 being the highlight to bring the team total to 188. The only batsman who disappointed was Tom Cooper who got out scoring just a single.

As usual, the captain of the Kolkata Knight Riders namely Gautam Gambhir stuck to the age old theory having four of his bowlers bowl their full quota of 4 overs with Laxmipathy Balaji falling one over short. Trying to shift from Balaji who gave away runs at 9.00 runs an over, Gambhir turned to Rajat Bhatia who was even more intelligent and gave away 10.00 runs from his only over. Still, that was better than 10.75 runs an over given by Yousuf Pathan. Adding to the excitement, there was equal contribution from most of the batsmen of Kolkata but none of them were highlights.

The top scorer from Kolkata happened to be Manoj Tiwary who had 40 runs to his credit. In a game of cricket, in addition to team work, there should be regular partnerships and one man should take complete responsibility of his team in order to be victorious. Whatever, Kolkata Knight Riders came close to the target which will stop critics from pointing their fingers towards them. There were back to back wickets for Kolkata which halted their advance in the game when Ryan ten Doeschate and Lee got out in 18.2 and 18.4 over respectively. Or else, Bhatia had a great going with 21 runs at number 10.