Watch cricket video highlights between Kolkata Knight Riders vs Lucknow Super Giants. Indian Premier League 2024 twenty eighth match, played at Eden Gardens.
The Kolkata Knight Riders gave the spectators at Eden Gardens a Bengali New Year to remember on Sunday when they defeated the Lucknow Super Giants by eight wickets. This was made possible by Phil Salt and Mitchell Starc. With his season-best 3 for 28, Starc secured significant LSG wickets, and Salt spearheaded the chase with an undefeated 47-ball 89. KKR has started a run of five straight home games in spectacular form, as they now sit second on the points table.
Because of the middle overs efforts of their spinners, KKR was also left chasing a manageable goal; they kept LSG at bay even though they had wickets in hand. Varun Chakravarthy claimed one for thirty, while Sunil Narine took one for seventeen in four. Their eight overs went for a total of only 5.88 each. Regarding LSG, Mohsin Khan and Nicholas Pooran offered two bright spots. With two fours and four sixes off his 32-ball 45 at No. 6, Pooran gave LSG a competitive total. Mohsin took the only two wickets for KKR, both in the powerplay.
After the match, KL Rahul called the loss a “proper hammering” and attributed it primarily to Salt. Salt clipped rookie Shamar Joseph to short-fine leg, very immediately after being dismissed for a duck in KKR’s last game in Chennai. Salt was lucky to be dropped by Yash Thakur, although he would have still been spared by Joseph’s front-foot no-ball. Following that let-off, Salt hit a six down the ground to end the first over and kept going hard on the powerplay. That prevented Sunil Narine and Angkrish Raghuvanshi from falling cheaply and helped KKR remain on track. In the third over, he hit three consecutive boundaries off Krunal Pandya, which set up a 58-run powerplay.
In the seventh over on 31, Salt was dropped again at deep-square leg, which may have caused him to become cautious for a few overs. However, Salt gained momentum once more in the tenth over, which was bowled by Arshad Khan (who paid a heavy price for dropping him three overs earlier). Salt reached his fifty in twenty-six balls and took KKR to a century in 10 overs with back-to-back fours in the tenth over. After hitting Thakur for three fours in the fourteenth over and a huge six over midwicket off Mohsin in the fifteenth, Salt started to put the final touches on the innings. The KKR batting innings and the LSG bowling effort were summed up by his four-wicked blow in the sixteenth over off a half-tracker from Bishnoi.
Shreyas Iyer, on the other hand, overcame a sluggish start to go undefeated for the second time this season. With Salt accumulating runs at a fast pace and taking two early wickets, he did not need to take any chances. He only used forceful shots when the target drew nearer. Through the middle overs, he hit boundaries off of Ravi Bishnoi and Arshad, going from 6 off 12 to 38 off 38 without losing. He was especially effective from his hips since the LSG pacers made a mistake by bowling too frequently on a leg-stump line. He and Salt had the greatest third-wicket stand for KKR in the IPL with their unbroken partnership of 120.
In order to get another wicket in the midday heat, Shreyas gave Starc a third powerplay over following Vaibhav Arora’s early strike to dismiss Quinton de Kock. When Deepak Hooda, who was not playing well, cut him to backward point in the fifth over, he did just that. After that, Rahul and No. 4 Ayush Badoni combined to get LSG to 72 for 2 in 10 overs; however, Rahul was dismissed for trying to increase his scoring pace. In the eleventh over, Rahul hit Andre Russell for six, but he was caught for 39 at deep midwicket while trying to replicate the stroke. Marcus Stoinis was called on as a result, but Varun tricked him into inside-edging a catch to the off-side, which wicketkeeper Salt skillfully recovered. As a result, his stay was brief.
With 14 overs remaining and 109 for 4, LSG was in danger of finishing significantly below par. When Badoni top-edged Narine in the fifteenth over for a laborious 27-ball 29, the situation worsened. Narine concluded with a 1 for 17, refusing to give up. However, LSG still had optimism as long as Pooran was there, and he provided it with his 32-ball 45. In the last overs, he took on the inexperienced Harshit Rana and Arora, assisting LSG in scoring 29 runs off the 18th and 19th overs. But in the 20th over, when he had Pooran nicking behind from the first ball, Starc prevented more harm. This made sure that LSG could only muster 52 runs in the last six overs, and Starc capped off his comeback with a third wicket on the last delivery of the innings.
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