A bad scoring rate and the stunning innings by opponent Shubman Gill had cost Sunrisers Hyderabad their second game of the tournament. As a result, Kolkata Knight Riders defeated them by 7 wickets. KKR chased the total in just 18 overs. Young Shubman Gill (70*) and Eoin Morgan (42*) shined in their innings. It was Manish Pandey (51) who played a sensible knock for Sunrisers Hyderabad.
SRH won the toss and elected to bat first. Openers David Warner and Jonny Bairstow looked in good touch until Pat Cummins bowled the latter inside the powerplay. Warner then ran a sensible show with Manish Pandey. When he is settled in the crease, Varun Chakravarthy dismissed Warner with a return catch. Wriddhiman Saha, who is playing his first game of this season, gave a good partnership to Manish. Though they built a partnership, they never tried to score boundaries. That kept SRH’s run rate only above 6 all the time. The low run rate pushed Manish Pandey to go big and in the process, he got out in Andre Russel’s bowling. In the end, they managed to score only 142 with a loss of 4 wickets in 20 overs.
KKR started off well chasing this modest total. Khaleel Ahmed took an early wicket of Sunil Narine but it was Shubman Gill who played a classy knock. Nitish Rana played quick innings in the power play and got out in no time. Then, KKR faced another blow as their skipper Dinesh Karthik was dismissed for a duck. As the asking rate is pretty low, KKR decided not to take any risk and played a cool game. Shubman Gill finished his half-century in the meantime, given good support from Eoin Morgan. Both of them took their team past the victory shores by scoring 145 in 18 overs.
Scorecard:
Sunrisers Hyderabad: 142/4 (M Pandey 51, D Warner 36, P Cummins 1/16)
Kolkata Knight Riders: 145/3 (S Gill 70*, E Morgan 42*, R Khan 1/25)