Kolkata Knight Riders 235 for 6 (Narine 81, Salt 32, Raghuvanshi 32, Naveen 3-49) beat Lucknow Super Giants 137 (Stoinis 36, Rana 3-24, Varun 3-30, Russell 2-17) by 98 runs
Sunil Narine crashed 81 off 39 deliveries and Ramandeep Singh got only six balls to face and smashed 25 in those. In addition, Phil Salt, Angkrish Raghuvanshi and Shreyas Iyer played aggressive innings. All of which meant that Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) surged to 235 for 6 in their 20 overs, which in Lucknow – one of the lower-scoring venues in IPL 2024 – was always going to be incredibly difficult to surpass.
The Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) innings didn’t really take off. There was a 50-run second-wicket partnership between KL Rahul and Marcus Stoinis, but even that went at too slow a pace (they took 33 balls) to cause serious problems for KKR. Once that stand was broken, the innings fell apart quickly, the last nine wickets falling for 67 runs, as the required rate ballooned out of control.
Varun Chakravarthy and Harshit Rana took three wickets each. Andre Russell took two. And Ramandeep claimed two catches, the first of which was one of the most spectacular of the season.
Narine crushes it in the first 12 overs
Salt was the first aggressor, hitting 24 off the first nine balls he faced. But he was soon out for 32 off 14, and from then, it was the Narine show.
Narine warmed up with five fours, then started getting the big hits going at the end of the fourth over, bludgeoning a Mohsin Khan short ball over deep square-leg, clubbing Krunal Pandya over deep midwicket not long after, and later thrashing Yash Thakur over the square-leg boundary. In the middle overs, he dealt almost exclusively in sixes, and by the end of his stay, he had walloped seven, to go with six fours. He holed out to long-off attempting another six off LSG’s best bowler Ravi Bishnoi, who was the only one to finish with an economy rate lower than 11.
Ramandeep plays a cameo to remember
LSG had a good period between overs 14 and 18, where they conceded only 45 while taking three wickets. Thanks to Narine, Salt and Raghuvanshi, with whom Narine shared a 79-run partnership, KKR were headed for a mammoth score. But the slight slowdown might have given LSG a foot in the door.
Ramandeep pushed the total back into gargantuan territory in spectacular style. He took a two in front of square on the leg side to start with, bashed a six over cow corner second ball, bludgeoned one over long-on fourth ball, ramped a four over short third next, then thumped a full toss over midwicket to finish the innings. To recap, he went 2, 6, 1, 6, 4, 6.
As if scoring at a strike rate of more than 400 wasn’t impressive enough, he also pulled off one of the catches of the season to get rid of Arshin Kulkarni. Speeding towards the boundary from point, he kept his eyes on a leading edge that had gone high into the air, and put in a spectacular dive to get his hands on a ball whose trajectory he did not seem like he would intersect. He took another catch at deep point later, to dismiss Rahul, the other LSG opener.
And then LSG crumble
With a required rate of almost 12 set from the start of the innings, LSG were always going to struggle, given the quality in KKR’s attack. They scored 13 off the fourth over, bowled by Mitchell Starc, but then Narine came in with a four-run fifth over, and by the end of the powerplay, the required rate was up near 13.
When LSG tried to hit out, wickets fell rapidly. At no point did they seem to have the measure of this chase. On a slow track, on which KKR’s slower bowlers were effective, Rahul’s wicket set off a collapse.
Andrew Fidel Fernando is a senior writer at ESPNcricinfo. @afidelf
