The most consistent team of IPL 2024 emerged rightful winners of the trophy. After topping the league stage with nine wins from 14 matches, Kolkata Knight Riders beat second-ranked Sunrisers Hyderabad twice in the playoffs, first in Qualifier 1 last Tuesday and then in the final in Chennai on Sunday, both times by eight wickets, to get their hands on the IPL trophy for the third time.
This was the most one-sided IPL in 17 seasons, with KKR pressing all the right buttons from the time SRH captain Pat Cummins won the toss and backed his aggressive batsmen to put up a winning total. Travis Head, who came into the final leading the way with 567 runs striking at 192, was out for a golden duck – his second blob of the playoffs, after Mitchell Starc cleaned him up in Qualifier 2 – when he edged Vaibhav Arora behind the stumps, and Starc bowled arguably the ball of the competition to clean up Abhishek Sharma. In 12 deliveries, the most devastating opening pair of IPL 2024 was back in the dugout.
With the ball swinging on a proper red-soil surface, the SRH batsmen were all at sea and unsure of what approach to take. Rahul Tripathi backed his aggressive instincts only to become Starc’s second wicket of the Powerplay, and when Harshit Rana nipped out Nitish Reddy in the seventh over, the match was over as contest.
Aiden Markram (20) and Cummins (24) were the only SRH players to make it past 20, as Andre Russell underlined his value as a big-match player – he has won T20 titles across the globe – with three wickets. Varun Chakravarthy and Sunil Narine pocketed a wicket apiece to show why their respective brands of spin have been massive for KKR in their run to the title, and the SRH innings was over in 18.3 overs.
Chasing 114, KKR lost Narine second ball – after he swung his first ball for six – but Rahmanullah Gurbaaz made 39 off 32 while playing second fiddle in a stand of 92 for the second wicket with Venkatesh Iyer, who scored his fourth consecutive half-century in an IPL playoff match.
Iyer struck his first three balls faced for 16 runs, and never looked back. At one stage 40 off 12 balls, Iyer finished on 52 off 2 balls having struck four fours and three sixes. The win was completed in the 11th over, a single stolen behind the wicketkeeper clearing the KKR dugout.
This was a win orchestrated on the field and off it, with the return of KKR’s most successful captain Gautam Gambhir – who led them to the IPL in 2012 and 2014 – as mentor working wonders, alongside the astute captaincy of Shreyas Iyer, the vault of experience in head coach Chandrakant Pandit and and assistant coach Abhishek Nayar. This backroom engine proved to be the best in the competition and, thanks to the volume of runs from Narine and Phil Salt and the success of the most balanced bowling ensemble – five KKR bowlers took 15 or more wickets – the franchise won the trophy by playing very good cricket consistently.
