Yuzvendra Chahal stars in rare low-scoring thriller as Punjab Kings successfully defend 111 against KKR | Ipl News

Miracle man Chahal

Flashing his quintessential half-sheepish, half-impish smile, he pumped his fist. The ecstatic teammates had converged into him, ruffling his hair and tugging at his shirt. From utter despair, he had pulled them to the brink of an unseemly heist.

After being shot out for 111, after letting the visitors tee off to 62 for 2, Kings had little hopes of a respectable defeat, let alone a turnaround. That the match would take a wild swing of momentum, that Chahal would enact one of the most guileful acts by a spinner in the league, was not even a passing thought.

But on the fourth ball of his first over, he removed Ajinkya Rahane, who misjudged the pace of the dropping ball and missed the sweep altogether. Even when the captain departed, there was little sense of doom, as they required merely 50 runs in 13 overs. They added 10 more runs without much ado, before mayhem struck.

Punjab Kings players celebrating after winning a match during an IPL
match against KKR played at New PCA Stadium Mullanpur on Tuesday.
Express Photo by Kamleshwar Singh

In the space of putting on seven runs, the defending champions lost five wickets in 22 balls.

The hangman was Chahal, bowling with angst, fizz and thrust, ripping in his full repertoire. He ousted Angkrish Raghuvanshi with a leg-break that he ill-advisedly tried to smear inside out over cover and mishit. But a close finish was still not a reality. After Glenn Maxwell nailed Venkatesh Iyer with a flattish ball, Chahal ejected Rinku Singh and Ramandeep Singh off successive balls.

The leg-spinner, the all-time leading wicket-taker in the league, produced a wrong one sculpted in a spin laboratory to fox Rinku. The ball hung eternally in the air, tempting the left-hander to greet it before landing, drifted away like a hat in the breeze and dropped suddenly. By then, Rinku had already lost his shape. But he still chased the ball that was leaving him, tried to salvage himself with a wild flap, but still missed the ball and was stumped.

A sudden fountain of hope burst in the stands. Knight froze, they were at a loss for reactions. Ramandeep paddling a full ball to leg-slip (Shreyas Iyer sprinted from first slip), was a shot borne out of pure daze than one planned to dishevel his length.

But the target was so low that it seemed just a couple of Andre Russell blows away from being overhauled. He did wield the long handle to loot 16 runs of Chahal’s figure-distorting over. But the momentum was irresistibly in Punjab Kings’ hand that they blasted the lower order, and finally Russell, to snatch the most improbable win on a largely placid surface.

Shocking implosion

After the dramatic game, Kings’ coach Ricky Ponting would admit that his heartbeat was still racing. But two hours ago, his heart would have been barely beating, as he watched with numbed senses, a horror batting performance from his charges. There was a sense of both fallibility as much as fatalism about the meltdown, a combination of ineptitude, stifling but not spectacular bowling, and clumsy intemperance.

It took just three balls from Harshit Rana to change the mood in the stand from joy to despair. Priyansh Arya and Prabhsimranjeet Singh had regaled to 39 from 3.1 overs when Priyansh flicked a length ball to fine-leg. Oftentimes, he would dispatch the ball into the crowds, but this time he checked the shot at the last moment and hence imparted negligible power. Priyansh shook his head in anger.

So did Shreyas Iyer, whose home form is inconsolably depressing, as opposed to his sizzling touch on away grounds. Rana’s ball was short and wide, perhaps too short and wide, that Shreyas cut it too hard and miscued it to the plunging palms of Ramandeep Singh. Then kicked in a streak of contagious self-destruction, when a touch of caution was prudent. Josh Inglish got bowled trying to mow, like a novice gardener would, Varun Chakaravarthy.

Punjab Kings players celebrating after winning a match during an IPL
match against KKR played at New PCA Stadium Mullanpur on Tuesday.
Express Photo by Kamleshwar Singh

The hosts, thus, lost wickets in clusters. After Prabhsimran’s departure for a pleasing 14-ball 30, undone by a half-hearted airy cut, off another disarming ball, Glenn Maxwell and Nehal Wadhera clung on, with not so much purpose as with caginess. The latter tried to unshackle by pulling Anrich Nortje, the least suitable bowler for the stroke, unless he had really gone short. The ball was fast, short and strangled him for space to free his arms fully.

Kings lost three more wickets when adding 12 more runs in a display of depressing incompetence and insensibility. By then the mystery spin pair—Varun and Sunil Narine—had spooked Maxwell to such a calamitous degree that the Australian batsman was as sheepish as he was insensible.

After a nervous nine-ball stay, he tried to liberate with a late cut and made an entire household of misjudgments. He misjudged the trajectory, the length, the variation (wrong’un) and fatally tried to cut the ball, which strolled through the welcoming gate. Maxwell, after a decade of shuttling between franchises without any sustained magnificence, yet commanding princely sums, is now a more mysterious off-spring of mystery than Narine. Rest of them perished as though in a daze. How Chahal redeemed them, though.