Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) faced Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) in the 36th match of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2023 at the M.Chinnaswamy Stadium on Monday. KKR emerged victorious in the contest by 21 runs.
Asked to bat first, KKR got off to a flying start, with opener Jason Roy smashing a storming 56 runs off just 29 balls. Roy hammered nine boundaries during his innings, including five sixes. Meanwhile, Nitish Rana also played a blistering knock of 48 runs off just 21 deliveries for his team and was well supported by Venkatesh Iyer (31), propelling KKR to a mammoth total of 200/5 in their allotted 20 overs.
Wanindu Hasaranga and Vijaykumar Vyshak were the picks of the bowlers for RCB, with two wickets each. However, Mohammed Siraj also bagged one crucial scalp for his team. The wicket that Siraj took came in the form of Andre Russell towards the end of the KKR innings.
On the sixth ball of the 19th over, Siraj delivered a perfect yorker to Russell, which the latter had no answer to and was eventually cleaned up. Although Russell backed away and tried to hit the ball for a boundary, he fell victim to Siraj’s pinpoint ripper. The RCB pacer was pumped up after the dismissal. Even the crowd was seen roaring and jumping in joy as they celebrated the wicket.
Here’s the video:
𝙎𝙚𝙣𝙨𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡!
What a ball that from @mdsirajofficial to Andre Russell 👏🏻👏🏻
He's having an exceptional #TATAIPL 2023 so far with the ball 👌🏻👌🏻#RCBvKKR pic.twitter.com/x8299PiFvw
— IndianPremierLeague (@IPL) April 26, 2023
Notably, after trapping Russell, Siraj moved up to the no. 1 position in the top wicket-takers tally with 14 wickets in eight matches.
Coming back to the match, RCB got off to a shaky start and lost their opener Faf du Plessis, early. However, skipper Virat Kohli held the innings together with a composed knock of 54 runs off 37 balls, including six fours. Mahipal Lomror also played a quickfire inning of 34 runs off 18 deliveries. But the rest of the batting lineup failed to fire, and RCB ultimately fell short of the target, managing only 179/8 in their 20 overs.
On the other hand, Varun Chakravarthy was the star of the show for KKR, picking up three wickets for just 27 runs in his quota of four overs. Suyash Sharma and Russell also picked up two wickets each.