KKR defeat SRH Emotional Rollercoaster: Arora lights up the Knights sky, Rana tricks Reddy and Starc shines again in big final

Starc gets real for Sharma

Just before the toss as Mitchell Starc was marking his run-up, Abhishek Sharma stood at the opposite end and was shadow batting a lofted shot. He even appeared to be visualising what he would be facing later on. But never in his wildest dreams he would have expected to face a peach of a delivery from Mitchell Starc. It angled in at good pace and just shaped away, taking the off stump with it. Starc had struck again in the first over of a big match.

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📽️ 𝗥𝗔𝗪 𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗦

Moments of pure joy, happiness, jubilation, and happy tears 🥹

What it feels to win the #TATAIPL Final 💜

Scorecard ▶️ https://t.co/lCK6AJCdH9#KKRvSRH | #Final | #TheFinalCall | @KKRiders pic.twitter.com/987TCaksZz

— IndianPremierLeague (@IPL) May 26, 2024

From banter to bullet

There was funny banter between Mitch Starc and Travis Head, at the non-striker’s end, after the first ball in the IPL final. The first ball swung past the outside edge of Abhishek Sharma, and as Starc walked back, he directed a gesture at Head with his thumb back at striker’s end. As if to say you get there. Head said something that brought up a big laugh from Starc. In the stands, a huge banner waved: ‘Travis Head, drop them dead!’ Three balls later, it was Starc dropping one dead with an absolute beaut. It landed on a length around middle and off and curved away past the iffy prod from Abhishek Sharma to clatter into the off peg. Starc roared, Abhishek winced, and the final was alive and kicking.

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In the Qualifier II, the amount of turn on offer at Chepauk came as a surprise. It is something CSK were unable to find the whole season. And similarly in the final, KKR’s new ball bowlers were finding plenty of swing. The lack of swing had been a constant complaint from CSK, with Deepak Chahar and bowling coach Eric Simons even finding fault with the Kookaburra. But KKR’s Starc and Vaibhav Arora were making the ball move both ways here. Whether it was down to the low lying clouds or not, they were not complaining. KKR continued to make inroads as Starc picked up another one. No swing here, just leading edge.

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Arora of shining Knights

For all the big hitting that’s been a feature of this IPL, it just takes a bit of movement at pace to redress the balance of the game. While the delivery Mitchell Starc unleashed to castle Abhishek Sharma would have got any left-hander, even in a Test match, Travis Head succumbed to some late movement and his propensity to stay leg-side of the ball moving away from him, and not exercising his feet much. Head allowed Abhishek to take first strike against Starc, who had made a mockery of his stumps in Qualifier 1. But if he thought that Vaibhav Arora would be an easier proposition, he was mistaken. The uncapped Indian pacer has just about enough pace to keep batsmen honest in the early overs, hits the perfect length and gets the ball to move, primarily into the right-hander and away from left-handers. The length on the last ball had him rooted to the crease and the late away movement forced him to just fend indecisively at the ball, resulting in an outside edge and the dismissal of Sunrisers’ man for the big occasion. Starc is the quintessential big-match player, but when he was not firing in the first half of the tournament, it was Arora who did the heavy lifting in the opening exchanges.

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A piece of subtle art

On a night of spectacular deliveries, Harshit Rana produced a piece of pure subtlety to devour Nitish Kumar Reddy. The devious setting up was there—three slower balls followed by one at full pelt, which meant he lingered on the back-foot—but you expect batsmen at this level to see through such layers of deception. But the real beauty was the ball itself. The ball swung in a wee bit, even in the seventh over, thanks to those dexterous fingers of Rana, which ensured the uprightness of the seam. That miniscule inward movement tricked Reddy. He shaped to ease the ball off the leg-side, before he saw with startled eyes, the ball moving off the seam after landing. He altered his stroke and tried to force it through the off-side. By then, he had lost his shape, his feet stood static and he could only swish his bat at what he perceived as the line of the ball. Nitish wore the expression of a defeated man.

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How the cookie crumbled

It wasn’t even a disguised slower one from Harshit Rana. Change of face, change of pace – both telegraphed pretty early in the piece and surely, Heinrich Klaasen picked it up. It was wide too. He waited and then went for an almighty swing but could only drag it back onto his stumps. It fit the low-quality nature of the final. Once the ball moved a touch at the start, the batsmen were exposed. Later on, they found unique ways to throw their wickets. A short medium pace ball from Andre Russell found its way to the hands of Starc at long-on as Aiden Markram pulled it expertly to him. Shahbaz Ahmed top-edged an awkward sweep to short fine. Rahul Tripathi perhaps thought it was an inswinger from Starc and went for the across-the-line swat-heave, but it was the away angler that unsurprisingly caught the top edge. Abdul Samad found a way to play a straight ball outside off, well away from his body, and contrived to edge it behind. At one stage, Gautam Gambhir, who had been sitting there emotion-less, was moved enough to clap for a wicket.

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One-sided climax

When a big game is talked up too much, very often it turns out to be a damp squib. An IPL final is inevitably a hyped event, but it seemed that only one team had come out to play. KKR had been the most consistent team throughout the tournament, but the best side can come unstuck in a one-off match. Sunrisers had shown they are a dangerous side, but Sunday was a day when the cream did rise to the top. And their success owed as much to the talent and big-game temperament of the group as to the preparation and homework done by KKR’s think tank. They read the pitch well and knew what sort of bowling would be most effective on the surface. Of course, it helps if the team has all bases covered in their bowling attack, and the opposition doesn’t have a clue how to go about an innings if they lose a few wickets upfront. The destiny of the big final seemed decided much before the halfway mark.

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Chronicles of Narine

And to think that it was the controversy over his bowling action which was reported that has made Sunil Narine an even harder proposition to hit these days. When the issue broke out and he had to remodel his action, Narine went for one big change. He began to hold the ball behind him, delaying its sighting to the batsmen as long as possible. He had been practising it for six years prior to that but hadn’t used it in game situation but forced by the problems over his action, he pulled out his trump card from training. “That helped my economy rate go even lower – batsmen see the ball as late as possible and have to react, rather than see what is going to happen. They have to wait and try to hit the ball. That split-second delay works in my favour, that second I have over them is helping me,” he once told Cricket Monthly. The SRH batsmen too had no clue, and kept waiting that fraction longer and could only push him around for singles. When Pat Cummins tried to take him on, he skied a catch to long-on where it was grassed by Mitch Starc.

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