Kolkata Knight Riders snapped a four-game winless run by securing a comfortable 21-run win over Royal Challengers Bangalore for the second time this season.
In their first encounter of IPL 2023, Kolkata's spinners had Bangalore's batsmen at sixes and sevens during an 81-run thrashing at Eden Gardens. On Wednesday at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, the saga continued on another sluggish surface.
Jason Roy provided the impetus to Kolkata's innings at the top for the third straight match, despite coming in as a late replacement. He smashed 56 from 29 balls with four fours and five sixes to lay the foundation for a big total of 200-5.
Bangalore made things difficult for themselves, with Kolkata captain Nitish Rana getting dropped twice. The left-handed batsman made the Royal Challengers pay for their mistakes, cracking 48 from 21 balls. Two sixes in the last over by veteran all-rounder David Wiese pushed the total to 200, which looked well beyond the reach of Bangalore's batsmen against Kolkata's lethal spin attack.
Virat Kohli played some delightful strokes as batsmen around him tried to keep up and perished. The star batsman, and acting captain, made 54 from 37 balls. Mahipal Lomror looked the most dangerous Bangalore batsman as he carted Kolkata's spinners around for 34 off 18 balls before getting caught at midwicket after attempting one too many slog sweeps against Varun Chakravarthy.
Kohli perished right after Lomror's dismissal, caught acrobatically by Venkatesh Iyer at deep midwicket off the bowling of Andre Russell.
Kolkata's Indian spin duo of Chakravarthy (3-27) and Suyash Sharma (2-30) were on top of their game, going for less than eight an over and picking up five wickets. While Sunil Narine was expensive, conceding 41, his Caribbean teammate Russell stepped up to finish with super figures of 2-29.
Bangalore limped to 179-8 and even though the margin of defeat does not reflect it, Kolkata had won the match well before the last over was bowled.
After the game, Kohli said his team deserved to lose due to their poor fielding.
"To be honest we handed them the game. We did deserve to lose," Kohli said.
"We handed them victory. We were certainly not up to standard. If you look at the game, we didn't capitalise our chances. We dropped a few chances which cost us 25-30 runs."
