Dinesh Karthik hails Varun Chakravarthy and Sunil Narine for strategic win over CSK

The tactics of Dinesh Karthik, Kolkata Knight Riders' captain, went well during his side’s match against the Chennai Super Kings in IPL 2020. The plan was to suffocate the team while defending a delicate total of 168 runs. KKR got success and won the match by 10 runs. Many critics have been calling, since a couple of KKR games, to replace Dinesh Karthik as captain with Eoin Morgan. Hence, the win against CSK should give much confidence to the wicket-keeper-batsman to keep his status.

The KKR score was average and tricky to chase for any team. KKR batsmen like Shubman Gill, Nitish Rana, and Sunil Narine started with the bat well, but could not materialize their batting decently. KKR played full 20 overs, and the 81 runs scored by Rahul Tripathi were the only strong pillar of KKR’s total score of 167. Tripathi replaced Sunil Narine for the team as the opening batsman. He batted till 17th over and helped KKR to post a competitive total.

CSK made errors and KKR took the chance

With Shane Watson back in his form, the "Yellow Army" started well. And after the end of the 10^th over, it appeared like the match was in CSK’s hand. However, Dhoni's team failed to recognize some of the smart bowling changes made by Dinesh Karthik for them. He planned the changes to the chase of the Chennai Super Kings. On the other hand, the CSK side made a huge error by sending Kedar Jadhav to the crease and holding back Dwayne Bravo. Jadhav just struggled to rotate the bat.

Dinesh Karthik is confident with Sunil Narine playing for KKR. He has revealed that for him to lessen away from the pressure, the administration chose to open the match with Rahul Tripathi. Talking further in the interaction with the media, the 35-year old praised the flexibility they have in their batting line-up. He also praised Varun Chakravarthy and Narine for their dismissal of the CSK batsmen, who had started the chase well. Both the spinners took away the crucial CSK wicket, Shane Watson and MS Dhoni. And this paved the way to their victory.

“There are some key players. Sunil Narine is one of us. The least we can do is back him. I am really proud of him as a player. We thought we will ease Sunny’s pressure a little bit and send Rahul up. Our batting is very fluid. I started at 3, I am batting at 7. That is the good thing. Over the years fluid line-ups have dine better. The way they batted at the start they did really well, but at the back end I had great faith in Sunny and Varun. That paid off for me,”.

Karthik told in the post-match presentation.

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