Kolkata Knight Riders batter Venkatesh Iyer gave credit to the bowlers after their eight-wicket win against Sunrisers Hyderabad in the first qualifier at the Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad on Tuesday. After losing the toss, KKR came up with a fine bowling, skittling out the Pat Cummins-led team for a paltry score of 159.
Mitchell Starc led the way from the front, dismissing dangerous Travis Head for a duck. Vaibhav Arora then got the big wicket of in-form Abhishek Sharma and soon, SRH found themselves under the cosh at 39-4 after Nitish Reddy and Shahbaz Ahmed were dismissed cheaply.
Starc showed why he is rated so highly as he returned with impressive figures of 3-34. Varun Chakravarthy also registered figures of 2-26 whereas Vaibhav Arora, Andre Russell, Sunil Narine, and Harshit Rana bagged one wicket each.
Venkatesh Iyer said after the convincing win, “More than the confidence I was really wanting to go out and bat, we last played a game on 11th, so we all were eager to go out and showcase our talent. The wicket was really good, credit goes to our bowlers for bowling them out for 160 odd. In a tournament like this, momentum is really important, we have seen that with RCB winning their matches continuously and gaining momentum even we wanted that momentum, so we wanted to go out and wanted the rain to stop but it was disappointing.”
Iyer added that is a dreamy moment to qualify for the all-important IPL final. The left-hander also played a key hand in the run-chase of 160 as he scored a fine knock of 51 runs off 28 balls and added 97 runs with his skipper Shreyas Iyer.
He added, “It is always special for players like us to play in the IPL final, it’s a dreamy moment for us, going to Chennai and looking forward to it. We have a realistic chance to win the trophy now. We were raring to go out there, when you have the momentum you want to really go out there. You saw Rinku fielding in hotspots and taking those catches. It’s the excitement we have to go out there and perform.”
KKR will be in action in IPL’s summit clash on Sunday at Chennai.
