Knight Riders: The deserving IPL champions

The Kolkata Knight Riders are the IPL 7 champions, quite miraculously at that. Having lost 5 out of their first 7 matches, no one even gave them a chance to qualify for the play-offs. But they did just that and more as they went into the qualifiers as the second placed team ahead of the highly fancied Chennai franchisee. And they did it by winning 9 consecutive games of T20 cricket, which included beating the team of the tournament (Punjab) twice. But did they deserve to be champions or were the Kings XI more deserving of the title. Read on to find out.

T20 is a batsmen’s game to the core. It is designed to suit the willow wielders. High scores, bland pitches and innovative shots have become the norm. Bowlers are on a hiding next to nothing. Even a great bowler like Steyn was torn apart 2-3 times in the IPL this year. But amidst the batsmen dominated game, KKR showed impressive depth and variation in its bowling line-up. Morne Morkel and Umesh Yadav hit the deck hard and created plenty of problems for the batsmen. Sunil Narine remains to be decoded and continued to bamboozle batsmen. Piyush Chawla and Shakib-Al-Hasan were also very effective and the thing to note is that all three spinners were of a different variety. KKR had the least economy rate among all the teams and can be safely termed as the best bowling unit in this edition of the IPL.

When it comes to batting, a lot of teams did quite well. Punjab was the pick of the lot and their run-rate was over 9 an over averaged over the whole tournament. This is the highest run rate in all 7 IPL’s by any team and they beat their own record that they set in the first edition of the IPL. CSK also had their batsmen in form and showed they were the team to beat when it came to strength of the batting line-up. But although Kolkata lacked the power hitters of these teams, what they possessed was a lot of calm and almost all batsmen in form specially in the latter half of the tournament. Robin Uthappa came into his own after a sedate UAE leg and after being 200 runs behind Maxwell at one stage, eclipsed him comfortably at the end to become the Orange cap holder. Other players chipped in consistently and it is this consistency which saw the KKR emerge as champs.

The other aspect of it is strategy. It takes guts for a team management and humility and modesty from a great person like Kallis to drop himself out of the playing XI. A stalwart of the game who could expect to walk into any team in any format, was replaced by Shakib-Al-Hasan and that turned out to be a master stroke, as Shakib contributed solidly with both bat and specially with the bowl to get the Knight Riders campaign on track. The decision to open with Uthappa was also an inspired one which changed everything for them. KKR’s selection of the bowling attack was spot on for most of the matches as they rotated Vinay Kumar and Piyush Chawla depending on the nature of the pitch. They should also be applauded for giving game time to Cummins, Lynn and Russell. That decision must have made these players feel a part of the team and helped the team gel well together.

Hence it must be said the team with the most balanced batting and bowling line-up won the tournament. The team management came up with inspired moves at the right time and deserves a lot of credit too. The most mediocre team of the first 4 seasons has wont the IPL 2 times in 3 attempts now. And the way the things look, they should be good for many more.