KOLKATA: Kolkata Knight Riders’ hopes of making the playoffs hung by a thread as they suffered a two-wicket defeat to Chennai Super Kings in their last league match here at the Eden Gardens on Wednesday.
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The defending champions have only themselves to blame as they allowed the bottomplaced team CSK, chasing 180 to win, escape to victory even after reducing them to 62/5 at the end of the Powerplay.
With 11 points from 12 matches, KKR, with two more away games to play, can at best finish with 15 points. However, they will then have to wait for other results to go in their favour to progress. The match tilted in CSK’s favour in the 11th over when Dewald Brevis cut loose, collecting 30 runs off Vaibhav Arora, hitting three sixes and three fours to race to his 50 off 22 balls.
But it was poor game reading by the South African youngster as he fell trying to clear Varun Chakravarthy in the very next over when the asking rate was just a little over a run-a-ball.
But in spite of being nowhere near his best, no one knows how to negotiate such a situation better than Mahendra Sing Dhoni. The CSK skipper and impact player Shivam Dube kept the scoreboard ticking without taking unnecessary risk. CSK then needed 40 runs in the last 30 balls.
Dube found the occasional boundaries as the duo brought the side back to winning path after four consecutive defeats, getting 183 for eight with two balls to spare.
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Earlier, the CSK spinners did well to restrict the hosts to 179/6 after Ajinkya Rahane elected to bat first in a must-win game for them. It was the CSK spinners, bowling in tandem in the middle overs, who managed to put the brakes on KKR after they had got to 67/1 in the Powerplay.
Noor Ahmad, coming into the attack in the eighth over, brought CSK back in the game by striking twice in his first over. The left-arm spinner broke the 58-run first-wicket stand between Rahane and Sunil Narine by having the latter stumped by Dhoni off his first delivery. He followed it up by getting Angkrish Raghuvanshi caught behind off the fourth ball of the over.
However, Rahane and Manish Pandey tried to consolidate things by stitching together a 32-run fourth-wicket stand, but the KKR skipper fell playing a reverse sweep off Ravindra Jadeja straight to Devon Conway at backward point. Rahane fell two runs short of his half-century.