IPL 2019: Match 1, CSK vs RCB - Who Said What

The curtain-raiser of the Indian Premier League (IPL) literally turned out to be a damp squib. The Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) were undone by the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) spinners on a square turner at the MA Chidambaram Stadium. The treacherous pitch witnessed the visitors getting all-out for just 70 runs and it took almost 18 overs for the CSK to chase down the total.

After losing the toss, Virat Kohli and Parthiv Patel opened the innings for the RCB. But the skipper was dismissed soon by Harbhajan Singh and his wicket started the infamous collapse which no one imagined. Moeen Ali batted at number three only to spoon back a catch to Bhajji. The same bowler accounted for AB de Villiers’s wicket to shatter RCB’s hopes of posting a decent total on the board.

The collapse continued for them as Imran Tahir and Ravindra Jadeja wreaked havoc. Both of them shared five wickets between them with the former returning with the figures of 3/9 in his four-over spell. Parthiv Patel was the only batsman to reach the double figures for the visitors as they got bowled out for 70 runs in the 18th over.

CSK huff and puff

The chase should’ve been a straightforward one for the CSK but their opponents made them earn every run. It also seemed that the pitch got worse as the game progressed. Shane Watson couldn’t handle spin at all to bag a 10-ball duck. Ambati Rayudu and Suresh Raina then added 38 runs together with the latter also completing 5000 runs in the tournament. He became the first player to do so as well.

Just when he was looking good Raina got out and the same happened with Rayudu. It was extremely slow going in the chase for CSK as Kedar Jadhav and Ravindra Jadeja ended the game in the 18th over. The Men in Yellow began the title-defence with a seven-wicket win over RCB while Kohli’s men will have to rethink their strategies again.

Man of the Match, Harbhajan Singh said:

I have learnt quite a lot while sitting next to the legends in the commentary box. It is nice to be out there in the park and it is a special one for me. I would like to give a lot of credit to my wife and daughter for this award.

You can’t ask for a better start – they had a lot of left-handers and Fleming told me that I would be playing and bowling in the powerplay. It was nice to get a wicket up front and it gets easier after that. Nice to get the Man of the Match in the first match and hopefully we can carry on from here.

Imran bowled really well in the latter part; it was nice to get Virat’s and AB’s wickets. It is a nice challange and it is nice to sit on this side and take this award.

CSK captain, MS Dhoni said:

No not really, I wasn’t sure about the wicket. We played a practice match on this wicket and it was a high scoring match, but usually in practice matches we score 30 runs more than a normal match.

But we were really surprised by how slow the wicket was. It reminded me of a Champions League wicket in 2011 after we won the IPL. The wicket definitely needs to be much better, even with dew it was spinning big. 80, 90, 100 is really low-scoring and if you have geniune spinners in your lineup you can create a lot of trouble.

We have communicated it really well to the players as to when they’ll feature in and in which conditions. Harbhajan’s is one slot and we’ll shuffle it around. He would never mind bowling on such wickets.

We need to score runs as well, ours is a batting attack where batsmen like to play their shots and you can’t control the toss which means that we might have to bowl first in matches as well. Other teams have good spinners as well and this isn’t the pitch we are looking forward to.

RCB captain, Virat Kohli said:

No one wants to start like this, but it’s good to get a game like this out of the way – this early in the tournament. We spoke of trying to be in the game, taking it to the 18th over was nice to see.

The batting wasn’t good, it wasn’t easy to bat on, looked much better surface though, I thought 140-150 would have been an ideal score, especially with dew expected later on. A scrappy start to the league, but I don’t think either team had control over it, the pitch was under the covers for 4 days, but we should have batted better, 110-120 would have been a fighting score.

He (Saini) has been good in conditions where there’s some grass, got his chance now. I thought CSK played really well, they deserved to win, but I loved to see our team fighting all the way.

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