Bharat seals it for Bangalore with six off the final delivery
Bharat and Maxwell stitch together an unbeaten partnership of 111 runs to help RCB beat Capitals
KOLKATA: For almost two hours on Friday, Mumbai Indians kept everyone guessing with their highest ever score. The more secure teams in the IPL were battling it out in Dubai but the heist was happening in Abu Dhabi, with Ishan Kishan and Suryakumar Yadav going hammer and tongs. It didn’t matter who was bowling as long as MI were bent on mowing down everyone.
Sanity was restored when Sunrisers Hyderabad returned the favour, racing to 70/1 in their Powerplay, eliminating MI and letting the arclight return to Dubai where table-toppers Delhi Capitals were trying to finish the tournament with 22 points. But a last-ball six by KS Bharat not only validated RCB’s IPL challenge but also proved once again that no team can take their place for granted. Delhi Capitals, Chennai Super Kings, Royal Challengers Bangalore and Kolkata Knight Riders are through to the knockouts.
Delhi Capitals finished top of the table despite the loss. They could have ended with 22 points though, having inflicted heavy damage on Royal Challengers Bangalore pretty early. Devdutt Padikkal was the first to go—ramping Anrich Nortje’s angled away shorter delivery to Ravichandran Ashwin at third man with pinpoint accuracy. Virat Kohli departed eight balls later. Nortje was again the mastermind, cranking up to 146 kph, bowling full and into the India captain’s body. But Kohli’s bat turned in his hand as he tried to hoick the South African over the infield, slicing the ball to Kagiso Rabada at mid-on. At 6/2, Royal Challengers Bangalore was half the side they could have been within 13 balls. AB de Villiers isn’t used to batting so early. De Villiers tried to survive, steadying the innings but the shots never really flew out of his bat. His dismissal---failing to clear the boundary and giving Shreyas Iyer a pretty easy catch in the deep, further strengthened Delhi’s case.
But the twists came pretty quickly in the 14th over when Glenn Maxwell was dropped twice, by Iyer and then Ashwin. Maxwell wasn’t going to throw away those lives, and so with Bharat, he slowly guided RCB within sniffing distance of victory. Till they ran into Nortke again. The equation was 19 from 12 after the 18th over. But Nortje mixed up his bowling really well, hitting either the good length or the blockhole, finishing with a yorker in an over that yielded only four runs. Needing to defend 14 off the last over, Avesh Khan conceded a boundary first ball when Maxwell cleared his front leg to thump a boundary through mid-off. Next four balls, Khan gave away just five but a wide on the last delivery meant Bharat had the freedom to free his arms and deposit the ball beyond the long-on boundary for an improbable win.
Delhi Capitals, however, were never supposed to end on 164/5, not after they had reached 88/0 at the halfway stage. Prithvi Shaw and Shikhar Dhawan were not exactly going at Mumbai Indians’ rate but rarely do teams falter after that kind of opening partnership. RCB though did well to keep chipping away the Delhi Capitals batting, accounting for Dhawan and Rishabh Pant within the space of nine balls. In came Shimron Hetmyer, launching into Dan Christian with a boundary and six but he couldn’t force the issue longer than he would have liked. On a slow Dubai pitch thus, Delhi ended up scoring only 36 runs off the last 30 balls.
Brief scores: DC 164/5 (Prithvi Shaw 48, Shikhar Dhawan 43; M Siraj 2/25). RCB 166/3 (KS Bharat 78*, Glenn Maxwell 51*).