Kings keep playoff hopes alive

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With dark clouds rolling in over cricket yet again, the sport kept itself in centre-stage as Kings XI Punjab kept alive their hopes of squeezing into the playoffs with an up and down seven-run win over the Delhi Daredevils at the HPCA Stadium here on Thursday night.
Having posted 171/4 after being asked to bat by Mahela Jayawardene, Kings XI rode on an early double strike by Sandeep Sharma and steady bowling from Praveen Kumar and Parvinder Awana to restrict Delhi to 164/7 and move to 14 points with their last encounter, against Mumbai Indians here on Saturday, to go.
Delhi found themselves on the back foot early when they lost opener Unmukt Chand, Irfan Pathan and David Warner with just 12 on the board in the fourth over, and were never really able to recover despite a late charge by Ben Rohrer (49, 29b, 4x4, 3x6).
After Praveen had bowled Chand with a beauty, Sandeep (3/23) landed a deadly double strike with the fifth and sixth balls of his second over to remove Irfan and Warner in almost identical fashion – one caught behind the stumps and then other at first slip.
Had it not been for a mid-innings 49-run stand for the fourth wickets by veterans Jayawardene (39, 42b, 3x4, 1x6) and Virender Sehwag (30, 22b, 6x4), the hosts would have left the park well ahead of schedule. The Delhi skipper rode his luck — and three lives — to push his team along helped by Rohrer as they put on 50 for the fifth wicket in just 5.3 overs but it was too good to last despite a late assault by Morne Morkel.
Earlier, the Daredevils had to ride out an initial assault by Adam Gilchrist (42, 26b, 5x4, 2x6) but still saw runs leak late in the innings to concede a sizeable target.
The HPCA Stadium’s size makes boundary-scoring a relatively easy business and Gilchrist and opening partner Shaun Marsh (45, 44b, 7x4) launched into the bowling in short order.
Ashish Nehra was hit for 27 in his first two overs and Pathan too was going for a few till he induced a mishit from Gilchrist that stood up for ages before the waiting bowlers was able to complete the dismissal.
That was in fact a signal that the pitch was changing in nature and the middle part of the Kings XI innings was a scratchy affair.
David ‘Killer’ Miller though swiftly changed the script yet again. Having played out a few balls to judge the pace of the surface he broke loose, racing to an unbeaten 44 from 24 balls with three boundaries and four trademark sixes, the biggest of which landed on the roof of the Press Box. Had it not been for Rajagopalan Sathish’s inability to get Nehra away in the final over, Kings XI could well have ended with a bigger total.