IPL Day 16: Royal Challengers are back….

Royal Challengers turned in their most professional performance yet in their IPL history against Mumbai Indians. To restrict Mumbai to less than 150 was crucial given the fact that Mumbai arguably has the best bowling attack in the tournament. The newcomer Du Preez ensured that Mumbai didn’t get much momentum upfront by dismissing 3 top order batsmen in no time including the crucial scalp of Sachin. Jayasuriya and Bravo repaired the early damage to an extent and posted a competitive score on the board. With Mumbai’s strong bowling line up and B’lore’s perennial opening woes, Sachin would have felt comfortable going into the innings break.

Like they have done in almost every match of IPL, B’lore came out with yet another opening pair – Jaffer and Kallis. But Jaffer didn’t last long which brought in the man who was playing for the opponents in the last year’s IPL! Uthappa has had a forgettable tournament so far, but he set a few things right today. With Kallis taking on Malinga & co in a classy counter attacking innings, Uthappa was content on playing himself in. And once he was set, launched into the second string bowling of Mumbai big time. An in-form Uthappa is great news for the team which is slowly but surely on the ascendancy in this tournament. After such a thoroughly professional victory, it takes a brave man to rule B’lore out of contention for one of the semi-final spots.

In the first match of the day, it was an all too familiar story for KKR. After a rather nervous start, KKR looked to be going down even without a fight till Brad Hodge took it upon himself to put on a challenging score on the board. He really carried on his rich vein of form from the last match and played a very good innings. He’s the only batsman in KKR to have got a fifty (2 of them now) in this IPL! Even though commentators were creating artificial excitement about the last ball finish, Punjab never looked like losing it or to put it more appropriately, KKR never looked like winning it. And they don’t look like winning too many more in this tournament. First fix the team guys, captaincy comes later…….