Bengaluru: Delhi Daredevils were back to their winning form beating the Royal Challengers Bangalore by 17 runs after they put up 183 for 4 off 20 overs.
David Warner’s opening over blitz was just the kind of start RCB weren’t expecting. The last two matches had seen David Warner outshine Virender Sehwag with the bat. He took the attack to the opposition and made his intentions pretty clear at the start itself. It seems the brief given to Warner was to go out there and attack from the word go. Although he had a short stay at the wicket, he gave the Delhi middle-order the perfect platform to launch from, scoring 33 off 14 balls.
Sehwag left soon and after a brisk start of 58 off 5.1 overs Karthik and de Villiers put together a steady partnership of 43 runs. His fall got debutant Kedar Jadhav on strike who impressed with some fine stroke-play. Scoring a fifty in just 29 balls the youngster provided the innings an impetus DD badly needed. They were 139/4 by the end of the 17th over, when Jadhav and Andrew McDonald stepped on the gas and scored 44 runs of the last three. A total of 183/ 4 seemed quite competitive considering that the average first innings total on this ground in IPL 2010 has been about 155. The Delhi Daredevils seemed confident of being able to defend the total as they believed the medium pacers in the team would be able to extract some good bounce and movement to snap early wickets.
The RCB innings started on a cautious note as both Manish Pandey and Jacques Kallis did not go for too many boundaries scoring just 46 off the first six overs. Kallis was the first to go, bowled by an Amit Mishra googly with the score at 71. The turning point of the game was the eleventh over when they lost Manish Pandey and number three batsman Rahul Dravid both in the same over. Pandey played all over a McDonald delivery giving himself some room to smash the ball and missed it completely, while Dravid went for an ambitious second run to a ball that he edged behind the ‘keeper off McDonald.
RCB lost the plot thanks to some soft dismissals and a couple of run-outs in the middle. Robin Uthappa played another reverse sweep which caused his downfall as he top-edged it to Karthik who took a simple catch. The biggest highlight of the match was the catch taken by AB de Villiers. Praveen Kumar hit an Umesh Yadav delivery to long on - AB jumped and was airborne when he took a brilliant one-handed catch, turning and falling face in front, inches before the boundary rope.
Eoin Morgan too could not get going as he got run-out before scoring 17 off 13 balls. A rearguard action by Virat Kohli was a little too late as RCB was way behind the asking rate. After they lost Morgan there was little hope.
Delhi Daredevils would be happy to have broken the losing streak and with the comeback of Gautam Gambhir and Ashish Nehra expected in the next match, would become an even stronger team. RCB on the other hand should take this as a wake-up call for the middle order. Some cause for concern for the RCB captain.
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