Pat Cummins’ level-headed prognosis on match eve that his trophy-winning spree as captain would eventually run out of steam materialised too soon as Sunrisers Hyderabad’s record-breaking season culminated with a listless display against Kolkata Knight Riders in the Indian Premier League (IPL) final at the M.A. Chidambaram Stadium here on Sunday.
Cummins did stage a fightback, top-scoring in his team’s 113-run total with a 19-ball 24 at No. 9, but Knight Riders cruised to their third title win with eight wickets in hand and 57 balls to spare after restricting Sunrisers to the lowest score in an IPL final.
KKR vs SRH, IPL Final: AS IT HAPPENED
The sense of an anti-climactic finish to a rollicking season permeated across the 31,061-strong crowd with the public address system’s exhortations to cheer and create an atmosphere befitting a finale falling on deaf ears.
The winning moment was as much a dampener as half-centurion Venkatesh Iyer, with his skipper Shreyas Iyer at the other end, stole a single with a miscued paddle sweep to get his team over the line in a straightforward chase.
Venkatesh Iyer in action against SRH in the final. | Photo Credit: K.R Deepak / The Hindu
With Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’ booming across the venue after their win, one could perfectly imagine Iyer and ‘mentor’ Gautam Gambhir singing ‘I’ve paid my dues/Time after time/I’ve done my sentence/But committed no crime’ in unison.
For a change, though, Chepauk wasn’t yellow as fans of the Orange Army bedecked the seats with about an hour to go for the toss, before the crowd seamlessly turned into a judicious mix of orange and purple. However, the transition from being one of the most feared batting sides to capitulating for 113 in 18.3 overs wasn’t as smooth for Sunrisers.
Mitchell Starc’s timely resurgence saw the Aussie pacer square up Abhishek Sharma by getting the ball to straighten and hit the top of the off-stump with clinical precision in the first over. In the following over, Abhishek’s marauding partner Travis Head’s woes mounted when he nicked behind for a third duck in four innings.
When Rahul Tripathi got a top edge off Starc to the square-leg fielder in the fifth over, KKR had curtailed SRH’s ballistic top-order in the PowerPlay for the second time in a week. In Qualifier 1, Hyderabad had struck 68 runs in the first six overs despite losing four. But on Sunday, it took some show of intent from Aiden Markram and Nitish Kumar Reddy in the last over of the PowerPlay to drag SRH to 40 in the first six.
Sunrisers Hyderabad’s Abhishek Sharma is bowled by Kolkata Knight Riders’ Mitchell Starc. | Photo Credit: DEEPAK KR
And, despite the caution, Hyderabad fell 46 runs short of the total it managed against Knight Riders earlier this week.
The recovery never came as Harshit Rana and Andre Russell’s skill in the middle overs came to the fore again as the duo exploited the sluggish track by going short and taking the pace off the ball. Rana foxed Nitish by going pace-on and full after dishing out three slower deliveries and had the dangerous Heinrich Klaasen chopping on for an uncharacteristic 17-ball 16 with an off-cutter.
Russell dug it short to induce a miscued pull from Markram and went full to nab Impact Player Abdul Samad and Cummins.
Sunil Narine and Varun Chakravarthy were at their parsimonious best, conceding just 25 runs between them while scalping a couple of wickets.
But setting the tone in a high-stakes final is key, and Starc stood out just for that.
After being under fire for an underwhelming season and an overbearing price tag, Starc’s redemption reached a crescendo when he was named the Player-of-the-Match for all but putting the contest to bed in the PowerPlay.
He had dropped his Aussie bowling partner Cummins at the long-on boundary, and if someone thought one could be excused for helping an old friend in crisis, Starc would have none of it. He held onto a catch in the same position to send his teammate back.
The most expensive players in the league’s history, Starc and Cummins, had come face-to-face in the sport’s most high-profile tournament, and camaraderie would have to wait.
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