New Delhi: Kings XI Punjab registered their second win in a row as they outplayed Delhi Daredevils at Feroze Shah Kotla here on Tuesday. Kings XI chased down the low score of 121 in just 17 overs and with five wickets in hand. David Miller once again displayed some sensible batting and kept his cool till the last ball of the match as he scored 34 runs off 39 balls.
Earlier it was the trio of Harmeet Singh, Praveen Kumar and Parwinder Awana who bowled brilliantly and picked up six wickets amongst them and restricted Delhi to a 120 in their 20 overs.
Chasing the mediocre total of 120 on a batting track like Kotla wasn’t such a difficult task and Kings XI opener Mandeep Singh showed that as he hit flurry of boundaries in the first three overs and Punjab were 40/1. But twist and turn came in when Punjab lost the wicket of Luke Pomersbach and Mandeep Singh in quick succession which reduced them to 50/3. David Warner knocked off the bails to depart Mandeep Singh while Roelof van der Merwe picked up the wicket of Luke Pomersbach.
Mandeep Singh scored 24 off just 15 balls and scored five boundaries in his short-little cameo. David Miller and Manan Vohra tried to rebuild the innings but Manan got out after scoring just eight runs which brought David Hussey into the centre. Miller and Hussey played some crisp shots and were keeping the scoreboard ticking by picking up ones and twos quite easily. They put up a run stand for the fifth wicket and ensured the victory for KXIP.
Hussey departed after scoring 20 runs off 21 balls and it was Ashish Nehra who got the big wicket for DD but that didn’t affect the outcome of the match as DD were done and dusted in the 17th over when Piyush Chawla hit the winning run and took his team to the comfortable victory of five wickets.
Earlier in the match, it was Virender Sehwag who was looking in good touch with the bat, but fall of couple of early wickets, including that of skipper Mahela Jayawardene and, put him under some serious pressure. Sehwag smashed one six and couple of fours before he got deceived by a slower-one from Harmeet Singh. Harmeet continued varying his pace and made the good use of double-pace wicket and got rid of Manprit Juneja and Kedar Jadhav who could have been very lethal at that stage.
Meanwhile, David Warner kept on batting sensibly and went onto score 40 runs but he kept on running out of partners which didn’t allow him to take his chances in the middle of the innings. He was dismissed by Praveen Kumar who yorked him quite brilliantly in his third over. David Hussey was the surprise package as he tried his hand in bowling and bowled some very good overs to restrict the flow of runs.
Delhi daredevils reached the total of 120 with the help of some nice little innings of Irfan Pathan and Ajit Agarkar who contributed 14 and nine to the final score. Bhargav Bhatt and Parwinder Awana ended up with the figures of 1/11 and 1/21 respectively. While Harmeet Singh Bansal was the leading wicket-taker as he ended up with 3/24 in his four overs.