Noor, Little, Gill, Shankar give clinical Gujarat Titans top spot

Rahmanullah Gurbaz, filling in for the injured Jason Roy, scored 81 off 39 against his former franchise Gujarat Titans, but Kolkata Knight Riders managed to score just 179, which Titans overhauled with 13 balls to spare despite a scare in the middle overs.

Gurbaz was sensational especially in his takedown of Rashid Khan, who went for 50 or more for only the second time in the IPL, but the only support he received was from Andre Russell, who scored 34 off 19 at the death. Josh Little tied them down in the middle overs, resulting in wickets, and Noor Ahmad registered the Afghan presence with 4-0-21-2, including the wicket of Gurbaz.

Shubman Gill, a former Knight Rider, set up the chase, and Vijay Shankar and David Miller finished it off in style after two quick wickets in the middle overs threatened to turn this into a thriller.

The match started 45 minutes late because of a brief shower. That rumble of a thunderstorm at the time of the toss made Titans change their mind and chose to bowl. The pitch was spiced up, and Mohammed Shami found seam movement. He bowled through the powerplay to get the wickets of N Jagadeesan and the promoted and returning Shardul Thakur.

Even as the others struggled to hit boundaries, Gurbaz middled almost everything and kept hitting to where the fielders weren't. He began with a pick-up pull off Hardik Pandya, and followed it up with a wristy pick-up six.

The most awesome perhaps was the attack on compatriot Rashid, making room, picking his variations, and hitting him down the ground, for 30 off 11. The middle overs were unable to slow him down.

With Rashid taken for plenty, it was Josh Little who pulled things back for Titans. He just extracted extra bounce from hard lengths to frustrate the batters. His first two overs - seventh and ninth - went for just 10. At the start of his third, Venkatesh Iyer felt obliged to play a low-percentage shot, and was out lbw. In the same over, Nitish Rana found backward point with a cut.

This is when the arrival of Rinku Singh, hero of the last match against Titans but under a run a ball against spin in the IPL, slowed Knight Riders further down. Eventually, Gurbaz fell to a Noor Ahmad full toss having got only 54 off 53 from the other end, including extras.

Only a late burst from Russell kept Knight Riders in the game, but he himself admitted in a sidelines interview that they were 20 short.

The way the ball sounded like gun shots off Gill's bat, it looked like Knight Riders were way more than 20 short. He raced away to 35 off 20 in the powerplay without even trying to hit a six. Like Gurbaz, he dominated by scoring 44 of the first 70 runs.

Not for the first time, the Knight Riders spinners dragged them back into the contest with some tight overs. Just as Hardik began to open up, he got a peach from Harshit Rana, filling in for the injured Umesh Yadav. Having taken 10 balls to go from 40 to 49, Gill tried to hit Sunil Narine for a six, but ended up giving him his first wicket in six matches.

A grandstand finish looked likely as Vijay and Miller absorbed some dots to make it 69 required off the last six.

The virtues of taking chases deep get spoken about often because the ones finished early don't have the drama attached. Miller and Vijay could have absorbed three more overs of spin and waited for some pace in the end, but they decided otherwise. Miller first took on Suyash Sharma and hit two sixes, which hurried the return of pace. Now Vijay got into the act, hitting a six off Russell before dismantling his Tamil Nadu team-mate Varun Chakravarthy with three sixes in the 17th over. Before you realised, he was bringing up his fifty in just 24 balls, and Titans were back on top of the table with six wins out of eight.