Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) now became the first team in this season to reach the playoffs after beating Mumbai Indians (MI) by 18 runs.
Due to rain the overs were reduced to 16 overs per side and Knight Riders scored 157/7 in 16 overs and in reply Mumbai got 139/8 in 16 overs. With this win, they have 18 points in the points table.
In their previous meet, Kolkata broke the 12 years drought in Wankhede after defeating Mumbai by 24 runs.
After winning the toss, Hardik Pandya chooses to bowl first.
Knight Riders lost their inform openers in just 10 runs. Then Venkatesh Iyer once again played a saviour role after scoring 42 runs in 21 balls. In his knock he hit 6 fours and 2 sixes. Nitish Rana who played his first match in this season scored 33 runs in 23 balls.
Andre Russell (24 runs) and Rinku Singh (20 runs) played some handy knocks in the middle and Ramandeep Singh’s knock of unbeaten 17 runs in 8 balls took the team score close to 160.
Jasprit Bumrah after taking 2 wickets grabbed the purple cap again with 20 wickets to his pocket. Piyush Chawla also took 2 wickets while Anshul Kamboj and Nuwan Thushara got 1 wicket each.
In the chase, a strong start was given by Ishan Kishan as he scored 40 runs in just 22 balls. He hit 5 fours and 2 sixes in his knock. He along with Rohit Sharma put 65 runs for the first wicket. Rohit played a little slow as he took 24 balls to reach there.
Then towards the end some hard hitting was shown by Tilak Varma (32 runs in 17 balls) and Naman Dhir (17 runs in 6 balls), but they were unable to fetch the targeted score.
Varun Chakaravarthy was brilliant in his spell as he took 2 wickets by giving away only 17 runs in his 4 overs. Andre Russell and Harshit Rana both got 2 wickets each. Sunil Narine got 1 wicket.