IPL 2021 | DC vs KKR: Hits and Flops as ruthless Capitals thrash abysmal Knight Riders

After squandering a likely win over the Royal Challengers Bangalore in their last game, the Delhi Capitals came storming back in the ongoing edition of the Indian Premier League handing out a proper thrashing to the Kolkata Knight Riders.

The Kolkata Knight Riders were as poor as an IPL side can be and they could not match up to the firepower of the Capitals on Thursday night in Ahmedabad.

Here, we will analyse the best and the worst performance of the night in the game between the Knight Riders and the Capitals.

Hits

Prithvi Shaw

When Prithvi Shaw was going through a tumultuous phase in the last season of the IPL in UAE, former Indian batsman and now a commentator Sanjay Manjrekar had advised him to emulate the methods of Virender Sehwag. 

He had said that Shaw should not look to play strokes out of his comfort zone and instead should back his strength to the hilt, something on the lines of Sehwag’s school of batting.

Looks like, Shaw has taken that advice with full confidence, albeit a bit too late for his international ambitions. 

He went back to the domestic cricket after a horrendous run of form with the bat in IPL last year and a solitary Test against Australia in Adelaide and plundered bowlers to all parts of the ground in the Vijay Hazare Trophy to reclaim his opener slot back in the Delhi Capitals playing XI.

Shaw has always been a promising batsman, but now, having tasted the brutal reality of failures and the criticism it brings with itself, Shaw is looking like a wounded lion who is not holding back his punches in the pursuit of utter dominance with the bat.

The first casualty of his onslaught was Shivam Mavi—who played under him in the triumphant ICC U-19 World Cup in 2018. Mavi was wayward to start off his bowling, but as erratic he was in his line of attack, Shaw was equally punitive.

The first legal delivery was dispatched over his head with proper disdain and while Mavi did not show enough heart to test him with short-pitched bowling, Shaw was in no mood to let him go bowling fuller length balls outside his off stump.

One boundary after another, the grimaces on Mavi’s face appeared longer and longer as the Knight Riders were sinking deeper and deeper.

Shaw plundered Mavi for a 25 run over and the chase of 155 was reduced to a mere formality even before the Morgan-led side could realise what happened to their tactics.

Having seen Shaw enjoying the pace and predictability of Mavi, Morgan switched to the SOS route and called upon Varun Chakravarthy in the second over itself. 

Dinesh Karthik was chattering behind the stumps in Tamil and was guiding the spinner that Shaw would employ sweep shot as he won’t be able to pick his variations. 

He was horribly wrong.

If the carnage in the previous over was not enough signs of his ballistic form, Shaw stamped his form and confidence as he waited long enough and picked a Chakravarthy delivery off the surface to punch through the cover. The over yielded 10 runs and the spirit in the Knight Riders must have started flattening by that point.

Morgan had no option but to throw all his arsenal to stop the Shaw juggernaut and hence Narine was called to bowl in the fourth over itself. He too did not get any respect though he employed tricks to deceive him. He pushed his line of attack wider of the off stump but the right-hander was equal to the task and put him for a classy six and a four on the consecutive ball to show Morgan that it was just his side that played a lackadaisical game and that the Capitals meant business in Ahmedabad.

He motored along to a 14-ball 44 but stopped for a little and completed and brought up an 18-ball 50. Right after completing his fifty, he treated Cummins in the same way he treated Mavi to complete a poetic justice of the misery of the Knight Riders.

There was no stopping Shaw and the Knight Riders bowlers kept providing him with loose balls to keep him going. He was poised for an unbeaten match-winning innings but he never cared about that in his short career. He perished in the process but not before putting the whole Knight Riders on the brink by performances that earned him standing applause from his coach Ricky Ponting.

Lalit Yadav

Rishabh Pant had said that the Delhi Capitals were grooming Lalit Yadav after the right-hander played a patient knock against the Mumbai Indians to help the side clinch a game.

He produced yet another game-changing performances against the Knight Riders and chipped with success in the middle phase of the game. 

Pant took a big punt on him by introducing him just after the end of the first powerplay when the right-handed duo of Shubman Gill and Rahul Tripathi was at the crease. The game could have slipped away from the Capitals’ grapes had Yadav let either of them go off the hook.

Instead, he tightened the noose around both Gill and Tripathi and yielded only 11 runs from his first 12 balls. The move paid off and it emboldened Pant into giving him another over and it turned out to be a rewarding one for all the pressure he built on the batsmen.

First, skipper Eoin Morgan, playing true to his reputation and style, took a risk of hitting over the cover. Morgan, like always, was standing leg side of the ball to have plenty of room, but aware the Morgan’s intention, Yadav fired on towards him and a cramped aerial shot found Steve Smith at long-off.

The Knight Riders have been too funk for their own downfall and the move continued with promoting Sunil Narine over the likes of Russell and Karthik, who have been deemed as only finishers of the side. 

Yadav fired another one in towards another left-hander in Narine, but that time, the ball gripped and turned to castle the fading all-rounder from Trinidad and Tobago.

There has been a big hole created by the departure of R Ashwin from the Capitals side, but at least for that delivery that beat Narine all ends up, Pant and Ponting would not have missed Ashwin.

Pant missed another trick by not finishing the four over the quota of another spinner having done that on two occasions with Amit Mishra and R Ashwin, but the Knight Riders were too average to challenge his call on the night.

Axar Patel

Before taking a punt on Lalit Yadav, Rishabh Pant took a bigger risk on Axar Patel by bowling him against Nitish Rana and Shubman Gill in the third over of the game. The move appeared to be a shaky one as Rana dismissed Axar from his presence via a brutal reverse sweep that landed beyond the point boundary.

However, the move paid off immediately after the big six as Rana got greedy and Axar Patel preempted his greed. Having reverse swept Patel over the off side, Rana expected the left armer to come straighter at him and danced down the track to go big over the leg side. Axar went further wide from the off stump and found Rana way outside the batting crease.

Rana departed after a big grunt but the Capitals were ecstatic at the departure of the Knight Riders’ most fluent batsman at the top of the order this season and the brave move of bowling Axar Patel had paid a dividend.

After the fall of Rana, Pant used Axar sparingly—one in the eight and then in the 15th over. He conceded one six each in both the overs. However, he came back superbly with the big wicket of Dinesh Karthik who missed an attempt to reverse sweep from the length.

Pant preferred Axar over Lalit Yadav looking at the pair of Karthik and Russell at the crease, and the Gujarat lad put his hands up and heard the big call from his skipper.

Flops

Eoin Morgan

Eoin Morgan was promoted as the leader of the side midway through the last season as Dinesh Karthik was failing to lift the performances of his fellow Knight Riders. The move looked a big one as he was replacing a prominent name in the IPL arena but the clout Morgan was carrying as the first world cup winning England captain, the promise and expectation beat any apprehension about if he could really make a difference.

After all, the Knight Riders have been on a downward slope after the departure of Gautam Gambhir, who led the franchise to two IPL titles in 2012 and 2014 and hence the team management thought of getting another larger than life leader back in the form of Gautam Gambhir.

The results though have been disappointing and more worryingly, the Knight Riders have been caught multiple times between hot water and frozen ice. Morgan by nature knows only one way of playing and he has a similar partner in the form of Brendon McCullum as the coach, who too, likes to live and die by the same sword.

On the other hand, the batsmen have not shown any signs of batting with the attitude of their leaders and even the fluent batsmen such as Shubman Gill and Rahul Tripathi have not been able to replicate their promise into explosive, match-winning innings so far.

While the captain Eoin Morgan has a long list of worrying factor about the team, the team has a lot of things to be worried about Eoin Morgan, the batsman. He has not looked in great touch and neither has shown any willingness to curb his instinct to grind and play an ugly innings that would get him going. Instead, he has backed the tried and test formula of hitting his way out of the trouble.

It’s high time Morgan will be asking some tough questions from himself on the batting front as well from the team overall as the Knight Riders are walking on the brink of the must-win all territory.

Shivam Mavi

Shivam Mavi was roped in as a fresh talent as a long term investment by the Kolkata Knight Riders in the IPL 2018 following a successful stint with the India U-19 team.

Spells of injuries plagued his growth as a bowler but he has come back fit and raring to go this season although the performances have not been on the line of the expectations made out of him by the Knight Riders.

Mavi should be feeling lucky that he got the opportunity to bowl with the new ball from a side that is rich with the presence of Pat Cummins in the playing XI. However, he made a meal of it against the Delhi Capitals and surrendered both his and his side’s effort against his India U-19 skipper Prithvi Shaw.

Shaw went ballistic against him and he could not gather his mind back after a couple of disdainful boundaries. He should have used his pace to alert Shaw against coming on the front foot and hurled a bouncer or a two to unsettle him. Instead, he kept on pitching it up to Shaw and Prithivi rolled on to a 25-run over that pushed the Knight Riders so far back in the game that a catch up fell way short.

The Delhi Capitals could not rise to the top of the table as they had lost a close game against the Royal Challengers but five wins from the seven matches at the halfway stage give them a solid second position on the points table.

On the other hand, the Knight Riders are just a couple of failures away from facing a situation of seeing an exit door with their every loss and hope and respite from losses of their opponents.