 Knight Riders notch up thrilling win over Royal Challengers
9th May 2008 08:00 IST
Agencies
Kolkata Knight Riders beat Royal Challengers Bangalore by five runs in a rain-truncated Indian Premier League match at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata Thursday night.
The win stemmed the run of four straight defeats that the Kolkata team suffered after chalking up two wins in their opening two matches.
Bangalore's defeat, meanwhile, was their sixth in eight matches in the competition and their second against Kolkata, after the inaugural match loss on April 18. They continue to occupy the bottom-place in the table.
Chasing 130 to win off 16 overs, the Bangalore team looked anything but confident early on in their innings.
Shivnarine Chanderpaul (7) was the first to go, caught by Murali Kartik off Ishant Sharma. Opener Jagadeesh Arunkumar created a flutter with a 17-ball 22, that included five boundaries, but wasn't allowed to prosper.
And when captain Rahul Dravid (5) exposed his leg stumps to his opposite number, Bangalore were tottering at 51/3 off 9.1 overs.
To give credit where it is due, the Kolkata bowlers were impressive throughout the Bangalore innings and reined in their rivals in an effective manner.
However, Cameron White (30) and Mark Boucher (50 not out) combined aggression with caution and slowly but steadily gave the Bangalore team a much-needed momentum with a 45-run fourth-wicket partnership in just five overs.
White, whose 16-ball knock included three fours and a six, was run out in a rather unfortunate manner in the first bowl of the penultimate over.
Needing 19 runs off the last over, bowled by Sharma, Boucher hit a boundary off the first ball, failed to score in the second, got two runs each in the third and fourth balls, a single in the fifth (that helped him reach fifty) and Praveen Kumar hit a four of the final ball.
But it was still not enough, five runs short to be precise. Bangalore ended up at 124/4.
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