Kolkata Knight Riders produced a humiliating performance against Royal Challengers Bengaluru in the opening game of the IPL 2025. The defending champions lacked belief and their strategy too needs to be monitored after a seven-wicket defeat to the Rajat Patidar-led side. The team started well at Eden Gardens, with Ajinkya Rahane and Sunil Narine playing some brilliant cricket but once they departed, wickets fell like a house of cards.
Rahane made 56 and Narine hit 44 as KKR posted 174 runs in the first innings. For RCB, Krunal Pandya had a stunning day, clinching three wickets and Josh Hazlewood picked up two. Yash Dayal too had a brilliant finishing spell but credit goes to the spinners to keep the KKR batters in check in the middle overs.
After suffering against spinners, it was expected that the KKR management will bring in a spinner as their Impact sub but interestingly, they fell to Vaibhav Arora, who didn’t look good in the practice sessions, leading to IPL 2025. Nevertheless, the team management backed him and that move proved to be a blunder as he leaked 42 runs in three overs. Despite a poor start, the team didn’t bring in Harshit Rana and Sunil Narine early, and RCB took advantage of that.
Phil Salt and Virat Kohli wreaked havoc in the powerplay, scoring 80 runs. Salt completed his half-century in style while Virat too scored a half-century and remained unbeaten for 53 runs as RCB got the job done in 16.2 overs.
Interestingly, the match was extremely one-sided as was the inaugural match of the IPL in 2008, between the same opponents. Only after a couple of overs in the second innings, it was understood that RCB would play a certain brand of cricket and KKR barely tried anything different to counter that. They now need to scan the performance and improve significantly to produce a better performance against Rajasthan Royals on March 26.