CHENNAI : Andre Russell kicked off his 2024 Indian Premier League season with a swashbuckling 64 off 25 balls to help the Kolkata Knight Riders beat Sunrisers Hyderabad by four runs at the Eden Gardens on Saturday.
Put into bat, Englishman Phil Salt (54 off 40) and Ramandeep Singh (35 off 17) gave KKR a good start, but it was Russell who went berserk in the death overs to take KKR to 208/7 in 20 overs. In reply, despite late efforts from Heinrich Klaasen (63 from 29 balls) and Shahbaz Nadeem (16 off 5), SRH fell short by four runs. Harshit Rana was the star with the ball for KKR as he dismissed both, defending 13 runs, in the final over.
Earlier, under new captain Pat Cummins, Hyderabad started well with three wickets inside four overs. T Natarajan was the destroyer-in-chief with wickets of Venkatesh and Shreyas Iyer. Opener Salt held one side and went after Marco Jansen, but he didn't get any help from the other end till Ramandeep walked in. The Punjab batter took on pacers to build the foundation for the big score. Kolkata were 119 for six when Russell walked in to bat. The allrounder went to work straight away when he smashed three sixes in Mayank Markande's final over of the day. Bhuvneshwar Kumar, in his 10th season with SRH, got the taste of the West Indies flair as well. Russell and Rinku Singh helped add 131 runs in the 10 overs to take Kolkata from 77 for four to 208 in the first innings.
Chasing 209, Abhishek Sharma and Mayank Agarwal gave Hyderabad a flying start with a partnership of 50 runs but Rana dismissed Agarwal and Russell came back to end Sharma's knock. South African Aiden Markram and Rahul Tripathi tried to rebuild the innings in the middle overs. The spin duo of Varun Chakravarthy and Varun Chakravarthy broke their resistance with two wickets in quick succession. Klaasen tried to keep Hyderabad in the contest with Nadeem but in the end, it was not enough. Rana, even after getting hit for a six off his first ball of the final over, came back to take two crucial wickets. Cummins walked-in with five required off the last ball of the day, but could not connect and Kolkata breathed a sigh of relief.
Brief Score: KKR 208/7 in 20 ovs (Russell 64 n.o.) bt SRH 204/7 in 20 ovs (Klaasen 63, Rana 3/33).
