Kolkata Knight Riders 114 for 2 (Venkatesh 52*, Gurbaz 39) beat Sunrisers Hyderabad 113 (Cummins 24, Russell 3-19, Starc 2-14) by eight wickets

Five of the six bowlers used by KKR took a wicket in their first over, including a golden duck for SRH’s talisman Travis Head to Vaibhav Arora in the second over. It is hard to find fault with SRH who had to take risks while KKR’s strategy was straightforward: with the ball moving, just minimise the bad balls and experiment less. Whenever SRH looked to force the pace, they ended up losing wickets.

Scintillating Starc

Starc didn’t quite start the tournament the way he would have wanted after becoming the costliest player in IPL history, but he turned up for the playoffs all right. The first ball of the match swung away to beat Abhishek Sharma, who was taking first strike after Starc bowled Head second ball in the Qualifier 1. By the end of the over, Starc had worked himself into enough of a rhythm to pitch the ball on leg and hit the top of off. It was an unplayable delivery at Starc’s pace. You could forgive Abhishek for not lunging forward because it was pitched on a good length and the movement was late.

Head got on strike only last ball of the second over, which is when Arora started on a good length outside leg, and swung and seamed it to finish just outside the top of off. Head pushed at it, edged, and was caught behind.

While Arora mixed up his inswing with various-paced short balls, Starc kept using the scrambled-seam ball to threaten both the edges. One outside edge flew wide of slip, before Rahul Tripathi fell off a top edge as he tried to push back.

Full report to follow…