Royal Challengers Bangalore vs Kolkata Knight Riders Highlights

Watch cricket highlights - Royal Challengers Bangalore vs Kolkata Knight Riders from IPL 2009.

Scoreline: Kolkata Knight Riders: 139/6 - Morne Van Wyk 43 (35), Chris Gayle 40 (37) - Anil Kumble 4-16-2
Bangalore make it with a ball to spare - Shreevats Goswami 43, Mark Boucher 25 (13) - Ishanth Sharma 4-15-2

A game that was dull before Bangalore injected some life into it by almost messing it up. The Kolkata innings apart from Gayle was quite listless with new inductee Van Wyk in his role as keeper-batsman ensuring Kolkata didn’t fade out under the 14-overs-by-the-spinners tactic adopted by KP.

Kallis looked comfortable and happy just knocking it around until the 10 over mark and this almost gave the Challengers the shivers post the ad/strategy break. In his defence he didn’t get as much of the strike as his new partner Goswami whose performance today was pretty similar to last year - debuting after the tournament had gotten underway and producing a very important knock for his team. If I remember right he’d got a 50 last year on debut.

The Kolkata fielding let them down at crucial points towards the end. Even then, Bangalore looked shaky and after yet another pretty display in blind-hitting by Merwe, Boucher seemed the only one around who could stay level-headed and actually see the game through.

Pregame: Spin options are being picked for RCB - Van der Merwe (who beautifully expounded blind hitting in the 2nd T20 vs Aus) is in along with Kumble and Appanna and KP (who’s picked up McCullum off the 1st ball at the time of this post)