IPL – 2 Deccan Chargers thwart the Royal Challenge
The moment Chennai Super Kings was out of the tournament and Royal Challengers went into finals, I wanted Royal Challengers to win the title for two reasons.
1. Remarkable leadership of Anil Kumble – winning 9 out of the last 11 matches and bringing the team up from nowhere to the finals. Same team that didn’t perform as well under Kevin Pietersen was performing exceptionally well, call it luck or great leadership, Anil Kumble delivered.
2. Royal Challengers Bangalore had played extremely well to beat my favorite team Chennai Super Kings (in the semi-finals) and further were the team with an Indian Captain in it (like the last time).
When Deccan Chargers were restricted to only 143 runs I thought the match would be won quite comfortably by Royal Challengers Bangalore.
However, Royal Challengers set about to chase in a rather cautious way. An attacking opening partnership would have demoralised the opposition. But, Kallis was too sedate and the hero of the previous two games Manish Pandey was not getting enough strike. (He stayed there for almost five overs but got to face only 8 deliveries).
Still even when the 20th over was being bowled, Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) still had the chance to win the match but for the foolish batting displayed by Robin Uthappa, who after having given strike by Anil Kumble wasted three precious deliveries without scoring any run.
In the end, Deccan won the match and the cup. Once again, an underdog team led by an Australian Captain lifted the cup, while the Indian captain led team finished second best.
In hind sight, I think I should have backed Deccan to be the winner so that my desire of having Royal Challengers Bangalore would have been fulfilled – as the opposite of what I desired happened throughout this IPL including that of Chennai not being the final as well as KKR doing well.
Congratulations to Deccan Chargers, they really played well to exactly turn the table – from position 8 in 2008 to Team No.1 in 2009. Let us wait for the Twenty/20 Champions League to commence in October 2009 as well as the Twenty/20 World Cup in England.
The tournament as a whole was very enjoyable. Even though I do not like Lalit Modi, one must congratulate him and BCCI for making this whole series such a grand success.
As I write this the closing ceremony is about to begin. Got to go and watch that. See you!
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What a match. The closing ceremony fire dance and fire works was nice. I did not quite enjoy the songs.
I do not know what i will do from today in the evening as i have got used to watching the IPL for the last over 5 weeks every day in the evening…..
Anand,
Yes. It was a super match. I too enjoyed the post match closing ceremony except for the dance of Lalit Modi with Katrina Kaif. Was he trying to make Katrina Kaif look even more beautiful and a better dancer?
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I am just 5 ft 7 inches; so I cannot and do not make any "tall" claims :-)
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