Knight Riders take the Royals for a "Spin"

Seamers have performed incredibly well for the first few games of this IPL season. However, the spinners came along to the party in this particular fixture as the Knight Riders beat Rajasthan Royals comprehensively at the Eden Gardens earlier today.

Shakib Al Hassan led the way for the West Bengal side with excellent figures of 3 wickets for just 17 runs. The batsmen seemed uncomfortable facing the Bangladeshi skipper and the crowd even got to see them leave deliveries, which is a rare sight in a T20 cricket. This seems to be the ideal platform for the man, who has often got limited chances to shine for his side. Though today’s performance will do a lot to improve his chances to become a permanent fixture in the lineup.

Along with him , he had the powerful Yusuf Pathan, who did his job in keeping up the pressure. Overall, the Knight riders played a brilliant first half, doing well to restrict the Royals to a meagre 131.

Out came the Kolkata openers as they looked to achieve a considerably easy task. Little did the crowd expect, that it was going to be a close game at the end. Gambhir’s men, evidently, looked to just go back with a win, rather than concentrate on boosting the net run rate. Even here, the spinners stood up to the captain’s call and performed to their highest potential with Botha, Menaria and Hogg bagging key wickets.

Tension surrounded the air as the match inched towards its final moments before Yusuf Pathan and Ryan Doeschate put an end to Rajasthan’s dim hopes.

KEY POINTS:

1)Partnerships were the key to the fixture, which Dravid’s clearly men lacked.

2) One looking at the run rate graphs would have thought it was a pretty close game, but people watching knew that the Knight riders were just taking it one over at a time and were always in the more comfortable position of the two.

Though there were a few hiccups on the course to victory, it was a well deserved victory for the Knights. On the other hand, Rajasthan have plenty to improve from this outing as their batting fails to shine again.

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