KKR – Kolkata Knight Riders and SRH – Sunrisers Hyderabad have paid over Rs.20 crores in the IPL Mini auction for Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins, respectively. Both the teams needed the Aussie stars to bring their flavour of cricket to IPL and drive their teams to playoffs and even win the trophy, if possible. Hence, their head to head has become a point to look forward to in this match.
Also Gautham Gambhir’s return to KKR has created enough buzz around the team. At Eden Gardens, SRH won the toss and elected to field first. SRH have gone with Pat Cummins and rest all South African cricketers – Marco Jansen, Heinrich Klassen and Aiden Markram in their line-up. KKR looked pretty pleasant with Shreyas Iyer return to the XI.
KKR have come up with Sunil Narine and Phil Salt opening combination for this match. Narine got run out but Phil Salt took on Marco Jansen and hit him for 3 sixes. Well, at the other end, Bhuvaneshwar Kumar and Natarajan did not allow easy runs. Hence, KKR lost Venkatesh Iyer, Shreyas Iyer and Nitish Rana for low scores.
At this troubling time, Ramandeep Singh took on SRH bowlers and scored 35 runs off 17 balls. Phil Salt completed his fifty and got out after scoring 54 off 40 balls. Dre Russ – Andre Russell, walked out in great mood and took on spinner of SRH. He kept smacking bowlers all over and made 64 runs off 25 balls.
His powerful batting took KKR past 200 and even though in last over Natarajan dragged the momentum with just 8 runs, KKR still ended with 208/7 from 20 overs from 119/6 from 14 overs. Dre Russ and Rinku Singh(23) have put on 81 runs to push the scoring so high. T Natarajan(3/32) has been pick of the bowlers for SRH.