On May 26, at Chennai Kolkata Knight Riders beat Sunrisers Hyderabad by wickets with 57 balls remaining after chasing a total of 114 to take home their third IPL trophy.
KKR had earlier won the IPL title in 2014.
Iyer (52) and Gurbaz (39), after Narine was out for just six runs, took SRH bowlers to the cleaners in the opening overs. KKR were 72 for one in six overs. It was a brutal innings from Venkatesh Iyer of Kolkata. After Rahmanullah Gurbaz got Ryan Burl caught off Shreyas’ bowling, Shreyas came out to bat and played an important role alongside Venkatesh Iyer in closing down KKR’s business.
In just 10.3 overs KKR made up their winning runs as the bench started rejoicing over it. Unraveling shows that this final match was only one-sidedly played. SRH couldn’t handle pressure caused by fast bowlers from KKR so early on into the game.
Beforehand, on such a day like this, Sunrisers Hyderabad were bundled out for only 113 by Kolkata Knight Riders’ bowlers.
This is intriguing because it is the lowest ever total scored during an Indian Premier League finals match.
Abhishek Sharma (2) became Mitchell Starc’s first victim before he went away with him right at his first over while Rahul Tripathi also fell prey to him in his very first spell of three overs.
Meanwhile Vaibhav Arora dismissed Travis Head, another dangerous opener without scoring at all while he had already hit at least six runs.
After Tripathi was gone, SRH was struggling at three wickets down for only twenty-one runs. Later on came about some tight bowling from KKR and also there were several run-outs involving SRH batsmen. A sequence of quick dismissals saw the back of Aiden Markram (20), Nitish Kumar Reddy (13), Shahbaz Ahmed (8) and impact player Abdul Samad (4) with the score at 77 for 7.
