Delhi post predictable win over pathetic Kolkata by CricketArchive Staff Reporter

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Scorecard:	Delhi Daredevils v Kolkata Knight Riders
Player:	MN van Wyk, BB McCullum, G Gambhir, TM Dilshan, A Mishra
Event:	Indian Premier League 2009

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DateLine: 5th May 2009

 

Kolkata Knight Riders are just not destined to win. They dropped Gautam Gambhir, and when he was caught, the umpire gave him not out. They dropped Tillekeratne Dilshan, and he carted Ishant Sharma for a six, when things were still tight. They misfielded and let twos become boundaries, and ones become twos. Then they dropped Gambhir again, but by that time it was all over.

 

It is written somewhere that Kolkata would not win.

 

Delhi Daredevils got back to their winning ways, completing a flattering nine-wicket to climb atop the points tally while Kolkata trudged off with another crushing defeat.

 

Gambhir would probably be happy that he got a half-century whiole he and Dilshan hammered out a 93-run second-wicket stand, after the stand-in skipper and David Warner had notched up 60 for the opening stand.

 

Kolkata couldn’t possibly get any worse even if they tried. In the entire game, they dropped three catches and managed to latch on to just one. One time that they did get to grab one, with Morne van Wyk pouching Gambhir off Moises Henriques, umpire Ian Howell didn’t hear the edge.

 

So now, Kolkata have dropped seven catches in two games, enough to keep them where they are – at the bottom of the pit.

 

The Delhi batsmen were barely ever challenged, and predictably they made merry. There was no way they were ever going to lose this one.

 

The Kolkata innings was a strange mix of desperation, good form and hesitancy. Brendon McCullum finally got bat to ball, and in one over from Dirk Nannes, he went after the ball, pouring out all the frustration and anger of two weeks of disappointments on the white orb.

 

On the other end, Van Wyk made good of the form he has run into, and while the two of them were at the crease, Kolkata were galloping along at around ten runs an over.

 

But McCullum was playing more on anger than form, and while his 35 had three rasping sixes, he wasn’t actually in command all the while. That also explained the rather ambitious walk down the track to Pradeep Sangwan that cost him his wicket.

 

Brad Hodge had been the form man for Kolkata so far, but on Tuesday he lost it, as also his judgment of the situation, holing out off Sangwan after Van Wyk had cracked three boundaries in that over.

 

Funnily enough, Kolkata had seven wickets left when the innings ended, so one would have thought that they would put the foot down and gotten a few more. But the Delhi bowlers realised the merit of slowing the pace of the ball.

 

That was evident from the manner in which Nannes was dealt with. The left-arm fast’s celebrations of being called into the Holland Twenty20 World Cup squad was tempered by the hammering he got from McCullum initially and then from Van Wyk, simply because he was so much faster off the track.

 

Van Wyk’s effort was brilliant and Henriques did his bit. But the final total was fairly on par with their poor outing in South Africa. The South African clattered 74 off 48 balls with 11 boundaries, playing all along the ground, the sign of a man in fine form, but the wrong team.