Knight Riders expose Sunrisers' lack of depth

Did Sunrisers lose the match in the first six overs, when they lost two of their best batsmen? Or were their batsmen defeated by a superior, dominant Kolkata Knight Riders bowling attack? The answer might be a combination of both.

The Sunrisers captain David Warner was gung-ho at the toss, and spoke about wanting to turn the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium into a "fortress" when he decided to bat in 40-degree heat. Yet, by the time the Powerplay overs were done, the heat was on Sunrisers, who were three down with Shikhar Dhawan, Warner and Moises Henriques back in the dugout.

At 36 for 3 Sunrisers were in a position that not many teams have recovered from in the history of T20 cricket, as their coach Tom Moody later put it. Gautam Gambhir, the Knight Riders captain, seized the momentum, introducing the left-arm spinner Shakib Al Hassan and Andre Russell before bringing on his original matchwinner, Sunil Narine, to suffocate the runs.

After 10 overs Sunrisers were in an unhappy position at 52 for 4, with Naman Ojha having joined the England T20 captain Eoin Morgan in the middle. Morgan by now had got his eye in and was batting on 16 off 22 balls. If Sunrisers had to bounce back Morgan held the key.

Morgan has rich experience in the T20 format and in the IPL. He has played the role of finisher in the past with some stunning, innovative strokeplay, but of late, as was evident during the World T20, the Irishman has become more circumspect. Joe Root and Jos Butler have played much more daring and calculated innings even as Morgan has watched them with lips pursed in admiration.

Obviously with Warner and Dhawan, who has been in wretched form, perishing to self-inflicted mistakes, Morgan understood he had to drop the anchor and wait a while to change gears. He remained vigilant, mostly, and tried the reverse-sweep against Narine a few times, but was mostly forced to rotate strike as the bowlers gave him no room to free his arms.

On the few occasions he was presented with balls to hit, he did not flinch, as he showed with back-to-back fours over the covers against Narine. The first one came off a floated offbreak and the second when he read the faster ball accurately. But you felt Morgan was stopping himself from going full throttle. You could see that in his running. There were at least two occasions when Ojha pushed Narine into the vacant midwicket area, rushed through his first run, and turned quickly only to see Morgan raise his hand, refusing the second run.

Probably Morgan was aware that no big-hitting allrounder was waiting to dash out of the Sunrisers dugout. With Yuvraj Singh recovering from an injury, Sunrisers did not have a big hitter in the middle order unlike Knight Riders, who had Yusuf Pathan, Russell, Shakib and Suryakumar Yadav.

Knight Riders were powerful even with ball in hand, as seen from the fact that Gambhir could wait till the 13th over before introducing Piyush Chawla, one of the most successful spinners in the IPL.

According to Moody it was a "collective" failure on the part of the Sunrisers batsmen, especially the top order whose failure had pushed the team to a point of no return. Moody conceded that Sunrisers had "missed the opportunity" to capitalise on a good batting surface. "When you lose two-three [wickets] for next-to-nothing it is very hard to be aggressive and shoot for the stars. Our approach was the right approach - we got ourselves in a position where we had a competitive total even though the par score, probably if we had the start we would liked, would have been 160-170."

Moody had accurately summed up where his team had lost the match.