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

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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.

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IPL 2021 | DC vs KKR: What Experts said as Prithvi became the Shaw-stopper in Motera

It was a Prithvi Shaw show at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Motera, Ahmedabad as he destroyed the Kolkata Knight riders bowling attack in a splash. He was all over the purple brigade right from the first over, setting the tone by hitting youngster Shivam Mavi for six fours straightaway. If that wasn’t the sign of things to come, Shaw, 21, made sure that every bowler that came to face him, was punished to the core. In just a matter of 20 balls, he reached his fifty with an array of fours and sixes. Shikhar Dhawan, his senior partners and second on the list of most runs scored in this year’s IPL, could do nothing but admire the show that Shaw was putting up. With an opening partnership of 132 runs in just 14 overs, there were mere formalities left as Delhi Capitals bamboozled KKR to reach the second position on the Points table. However, there were a few negative points on their way to the win, including Shaw losing his wicket and not being able to get to the hundred (scored 82 off 41) and then Pant losing his wicket too, to win just by seven wickets. Earlier in the day, KKR after being put to bat first, struggled to get to even 154 as all their batsmen failed, by either not scoring, or scoring too slowly. And hadn’t it been for Andre Russell’s 27 balls 55, getting to even a respectable total would have been impossible. Captain's Viewpoints Speaking post the victory, Rishabh Pant, the Capitals’ skipper was in awe of the pocket size dynamite that Shaw is. “I think Prithvi Shaw is a very talented player and if you give him the chance he will deliver,” he said. “In the break, I told Prithvi you just play your game and finish the game for us,” Pant added. Talking about the hurry to finish the game, the wicket-keeper batsman reasoned, “In this kind of matches, we can afford to think of the run-rate as the match was almost done by the 12th or 13th.” Avesh Khan and Lalit Yadav, the uncapped Capitals’ men were once again the stars with the ball and the skipper was hugely impressed. While Lait picked two wickets for 13 runs in three overs, Avesh Khan was sturdy in his approach while bowling at the death and picking one wicket. “All I tell Avesh Khan is to enjoy his game and concentrate and the rest will be taken care of,” Pant said about Avesh before praising Lalit and claiming that he can turn out to be phenomenal with the bat as well. “Lalit Yadav hasn't got chances with the bat much but whenever he gets a chance he will perform,” said the 23-year-old. The Uttarakhand born concluded by saying that he is loving the captaincy and clearly the results suggest the same. “I am loving the captaincy and if the result keeps going your way it's just the icing on the cake.” Eoin Morgan, on the other hand, was visibly upset with the loss, the fifth of the season in just the seventh game, making their next seven affairs almost a must-win one. “Very disappointed, very slow off the blocks and then lost wickets in crucial periods and it was Russell who got us over the 150 mark,” Morgan said at the post-match presentation ceremony. The English captain also admired the batting display from Shaw. “When Prithvi Shaw plays like that you don't have any options but to sit and admire,” he said. Saying that KKR were off in ‘both facets of the game’, Morgan deduced, “If we give so many opportunities to Delhi Capitals they will lash on.” Explaining why the Knight Riders wen with a young bloke like Mavi instead of an experienced Pat Cummins, the 34-year old said, “Mavi bowled brilliantly the previous day and finished off his quota at a stretch so we thought of going with him. Cummins was definitely in the plan but someday it doesn't go your way.” Ireland born complained that the team has talent but is just unable to execute the plans and convert the talent into performance. “It has been a learning curve for the guys in the changing room and we need to start to execute our plans now. We have talent but we need to turn talent into performance, which is not happening at this moment,” he said. Expert Opinion The experts were all singing praises of Shaw who was on fire today. While some criticise the slow batting of the Knight riders, others also targeted Morgan the skipper for KKR’s continued failure. Veteran journalist Ayaz Memon applauded Delhi Capitals' batting, at the same time criticising the KKR batters for being too slow and clueless. Ace commentator Harsha Bhogle compared the all-around display of Delhi to the miserable day in the office for KKR with boxing. Veteran sports journalist and one of Kolkata’s favourite, Gautam Bhattacharya compared the long leash that Morgan is getting to the snappy captaincy decision of the pat that the KKR management had taken, suggesting that Morgan is getting more cushion than he deserves. Boria Majumdar, historian and cricket expert is of the opinion that KKR captain Eoin Morgan is not at his level best and the team struggling to find its feet. Vikrant Gupta, a TV journalist pointed out how the Delhi Capitals opening pair is a lesson for other teams to follow. Former cricketer cum commentator cum cricket pundit, Aakash Chopra was on with his wordplay as well, praising Shaw for the ‘show’. While the road becomes tougher for KKR from here as they face RCB on May 3rd. For the Capitals, though it would be a comparatively easy task, although no game is easy, they will face another struggle in the form of Punjab Kings on May 2nd at the same venue of the Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad.