M.A Chidambaram Stadium, which hosts Chennai Super Kings (CSK) in the Indian Premier League, has looked very vulnerable this season and other teams have been breaching their fortress incessantly almost at will which looked like an impossible task even till the last edition of the tournament. 

Defending champions CSK, who are far from being consistent in this year’s tournament, hosted Kolkata Knight Riders which gave them a slight edge considering the fact that they were playing at the ground which has yielded extra-ordinary success for them. But things didn’t turn out to be the way Chennai had wanted as Gauti and Co. put up an all round performance to win the match by five wickets.

The win now has lifted KKR on the second position on the points table whereas it dumped the Champions to fourth position.  Even though they are number four on the points table, it is very short lived as the other four teams in fray have a match in hand and are lagging by a point or due to virtue of poor run rate.

Meanwhile Kolkata is looking a team to beat and looking at their performance they seem like that they would go all the way.
Here are some of the performances that mattered in the yesterday’s big ticket clash:

Hits and flops of Kolkata Knight Riders:

Hits

Gautam Gambhir: The skipper is leading the team from the front. After a match winning knock against Royal Challengers Bangalore, he played one more gem of an innings on Monday. He scored 63 of 52 balls which included six fours and six to anchor the innings and give a good start up-front.

Debabrata Das: After Gambhir got out on the first ball of the 19th over, Yusuf Pathan, who is going through a rough patch in the tournament, came out to bat. It looked like KKR would choke in the end and Gambhir’s fine innings would go in vain, but Das held on to his nerve and his 11 runs of four deliveries helped Kolkata clinch a thriller. He hit two boundaries including the winning blow.

Flops:

Yusuf Pathan: He is going through a bad phase in the tournament. Even yesterday when a lot was expected out of him, he just wasted his short stay at the crease and his wicket in the ultimate over of the match had almost sealed KKR’s fate, had it not been for Debabrata who hit a four to take them home.

Hits and flops of Chennai Super Kings:

Suresh Raina: Finally the willow of Suresh Raina fired. Raina, who has been going through a rough patch in this year’s IPL, finally stood up to the occasion and scored 44 runs to eventually end as the top scorer of the CSK. He hit four fours and a six in his 34 balls knock.
Bowlers: Even though Chennai had a very small target to defend, their bowlers bowled in a disciplined way to take the match to the last and give them an outside chance of winning the low scoring match.

Flops:

Mahendra Singh Dhoni: He stayed not out till the end and still could score 34 of 30 deliveries. After he set his eyes in, he should have launched an onslaught which he is very capable of. But he rather chose to hang on and rotate strike, a strategy which weighed down on them a little too much. Because the way match ended, it looked like had Chennai scored 20 runs more they could have emerged victorious in the match.

By Samikshan Dutta Choudhury
Indian Sports News