IPL 2024: Kolkata Knight Riders beat Mumbai Indians by 24 runs

MI find themselves on the verge of getting knocked out of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2024 after losing to KKR by 24 runs on Friday at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. The Knights also beat MI for the first time in Mumbai since 2012. Prior to the game, MI lead KKR 9-1 at the iconic venue, but the Knight Riders came out firing on all cylinders and came up trumps.

After MI opted to field first, Nuwan Thushara got them off to a brilliant start as KKR were reduced to 28 for 3 in 3 overs. The speedster opened his account by dismissing Phil Salt, after which he got the wickets of Angkrish Raghuvanshi. The Knights found themselves in all sorts of strife after Sunil Narine and Rinku Singh also departed quickly, leaving them at 57 for 6 in 6.1 overs.

Just when it seemed that KKR might not reach 100, Venkatesh Iyer and Manish Pandey stepped up. Pandey, who came in as an Impact Sub for Raghuvanshi, made 42 runs off 31 balls with 2 fours and as many sixes. Venkatesh had happy memories of playing at the Wankhede as he came into the game after scoring a hundred last year, although in a losing cause.

He brought up his half-century off 36 balls and went on to score 70 runs off 52 balls with 6 fours and 3 sixes. Pandey and Venkatesh put on 83 runs for the sixth wicket to bring KKR right back into the contest.

Andre Russell hit a massive six before being run out after a terrible mix-up with



Venkatesh. Bumrah bowled brilliantly at the death as he picked up 3 wickets for 18 runs in 3.5 overs. Hardik Pandya accounted for the wickets of Sunil Narine and Pandey.

MI got off to an indifferent start in their run-chase. Although they scored 46 runs in the powerplay, they lost the wickets of Ishan Kishan, Rohit Sharma and Naman Dhir. All 3 batters got into double digits, but failed to carry on. Mitchell Starc, Narine and Varun Chakravarthy made sure that Mumbai weren’t allowed to get away.

Tilak Varma, Nehal Wadhera and Hardik Pandya got out in no time as MI were reduced to 71 for 6 in 11.2 overs. With the required run rate hovering around 11, the onus was on Suryakumar Yadav and Tim David to help MI recover from the slump.

Despite the flurry of wickets, Suryakumar didn’t get flustered as he took 20 overs off Vaibhav Arora’s third over, bringing the target down to 60 off 36 balls. He got to his half-century off 30 balls. Just when Surya was looking ominous, having scored 56 off 35 with 6 fours and 2 sixes, Russell induced a false shot from him.

Tim David smacked Starc for a six, but the Aussie speedster made amends with dismissing his national teammate. In the very next ball, Starc removed Piyush Chawla as KKR got ever so close to victory. Thereafter, Starc pulled off a Yorker, castled Gerald Coetzee to pull the curtains down the match. Starc finished with figures of 3.5-0-33-4.