Superb de Villiers leads RCB to five-wicket win over CSK

Toss: Chennai won the toss and elected to bat first. Dhoni said that he expects the wicket to slow down later in the match.

RCB XI: Gayle, Parthiv, Virat, Yuvi, AB, Sachin Rana, Varun Aaron, Abu Nechim, Murali, Starc, Chahal.

CSK XI: DR Smith, B McCullum, S Raina, MS Dhoni, D Hussey, R Jadeja, M Manhas, R Ashwin, M Sharma, I Pandey, S Badree.

Chennai innings: Suresh Raina hit a wonderful 62 off 48 balls to help CSK reach 138-4 at the end of their 20 overs. But the rest of the CSK batsmen just didn’t get going. In the last four overs of their innings, the CSK batsmen failed to hit a single four. The wicket was difficult to bat on and there was a fair bit of turn for the spinners but then these are conditions that the CSK team know well. David Hussey scored 25 off 29 in the middle overs and had a decent partnership with Raina but it never forced the pace. For RCB, Abu Nechim took the important wicket of Dhoni and ended up with figures of 4-0-18-1.

Royal Challengers innings: Set a target of 139, the initial overs were a struggle for the Royal Challengers Bangalore. The CSK spinners kept the batsmen on a tight leash and Chris Gayle, in particular, struggled. But then Virat Kohli started playing aggressively and took things up a gear. However, when he was stumped after scoring 27 off 29 balls, the match could have gone either way. But Gayle stepped up (he eventually made 46 off 50 balls) as did AB de Villiers (28 off 14 balls) and Yuvraj Singh 13 off 9 balls to ensure that RCB notched up another win. And in the end, Dhoni’s decision to give David Hussey bowling (including the last over) helped as well. The Australian ended up with bowling figures of 2.5-0-38-2. At least to CSK fans, he is certainly not Michael.

Turning point: De Villiers hadn’t even got off the mark when he sliced a shot to extra cover off Jadeja. The ball burst through the hands of the fielder. The South African survived and went on to hit 28 off 14 balls. Giving the last over to Hussey with RCB needing 10 runs off was another decision that Dhoni may regret in hindsight.

Quotes

Virat Kohli: “Great win for us, especially after the wicket played in the second innings. Today was a great example of the character in the side. You have Gayle hitting out there, then AB and Yuvi in such for, you back your team. It was about rotating strike as much as possible and hitting with the turn and not trying something fancy.”

Mahendra Singh Dhoni: “Knew the pitch would slow down further, the spinners did maintain the pressure and that’s one of the reasons why the game went close. At the end of the day, catches win matches and you don’t drop big players. Its not the first time we’ve made that mistake.”