Sunil Narine’s batting debut as an opener in the Indian Premier League went something like this: swing miss, swing miss, swing smash! Much like a left-handed version of Chris Lynn. Against Kings XI Punjab at their first home game this season, Gautam Gambhir threw a joker into the pack and it paid off handsomely for him.
Of course, for those who keenly follow Twenty20 franchise leagues over the world, it may not have been a totally unprecedented decision. The Melbourne Renegades decided to open with Narine with some degree of success in the Big Bash and the 28-year-old from Trinidad has also hit a few big ones in the Pakistan Super League.
Later, in the post-match press conference, Ishant Sharma mentioned that the Kings XI Punjab captain Glenn Maxwell had remembered Narine opening in the Big Bash and so it hence hadn’t come as a surprise. Maxwell also probably remembered the other time Narine took him to the cleaners:
But as Maxwell knew and other found out, Narine can hit a the ball a long way. His style of hitting is old-fashioned and uncomplicated. See ball, hit ball — if anything it would have done Virender Sehwag, sitting in the Kings XI dugout, proud. If it was in his spot, he smashed it away. The opening stand between him and captain Gautam Gambhir got KKR to their highest Powerplay score in the IPL: 76/0 in six overs. Once they had got that, Kings XI Punjab had no way back and they were duly crushed by eight wickets.
So, temporarily, at least, Kolkata Knight Riders sit pretty on top of the table. Their net run rate is a strong +1.47, the highest among all teams courtesy their two emphatic victories. Their batting has clicked in almost all the matches. So is everything in order?
The answer is no, definitely not.
Perhaps, no other team has fielded as badly as Kolkata Knight Riders have done in this tournament. In each of the three matches so far, they have dropped sitters and performed some comical misfielding blunders. It cost them the match against Mumbai Indians. And if KKR are honest with themselves, they’ll agree that they’ve gotten very lucky.
Their performance in Punjab’s first innings was abject and horrible. In the first over itself, Piyush Chawla gingerly jogged to an incoming ball on the fine leg delivery and could not get down on time. It’s the sort of error that you would expect to see in a match in the 1970s when fielders couldn’t be bothered with dirtying their whites. The fact that it’s happening in a Twenty20 match in the game’s biggest domestic tournament is shameful.
But this was only the start. Two overs later, Narine dropped a sitter. Later on in the innings, he misfielded again to concede four runs. On the 19th over, in a comedy of errors, the Punjab batsmen ran four runs through a combination of direct hits and ricochets. There would have been another drop in the last ball of the innings as well but Gautam Gambhir somehow managed to cling on to a catch, after juggling it four times.
This is being mentioned because the lapses are not an aberration anymore. In their first match against Gujarat, Kolkata dropped Suresh Raina twice. Against Mumbai Indians, it was their fielding and catching, apart from their death bowling which cost them the match. And now this against Kings XI Punjab.
For all their bravado with the bat, KKR need to figure out a way to get their death bowling and fielding in order. Because when things are tight, the winner can be decided by the littlest of things.
