Today seems to be filled with an air of chaos. A short time back, we saw the Mumbai Indians losing their winning position due to confusion among batsmen. Now it was the Chennai Super Kings who lost their batting order completely and even in spite of the low total, could not win the match against the Bangalore Royal Challengers.
The main place of faltering in the Chennai Super Kings team, it seems, was that no batsmen took the responsibility of getting the score. From a very comfortable position at the end of 10 overs when they had 60 runs for no loss, the team crashed in and lost the match by 12 runs. Even a low total of 126 runs, which is arguably very achievable, could not be scored by this team which aspires to get into the semi-finals. However, with this defeat, their chances have lowered and now their fate depends more upon the Delhi and Mumbai teams than their own performance.
No batsmen from both the sides played any good games. The highest score in the Bangalore team was 47 runs by Dravid. The next highest in the team was Kumar with 21 runs. Morkel, from the Chennai team, however enjoyed a good spell of 4 overs which got him 4 wickets off 32 runs.
Fleming from the Chennai team was the highest scorer in that side. He scored 45 runs off 40 balls. The team however failed to keep their calm and according to Dhoni later on, made “bad choice of shots” and this caused them the match. The performance of the middle and the lower order was just disastrous with three going for duck and two batsmen dismissed on a single. The team collapsed on 112 runs. This victory was inspired to a very great extent by Kumble who hauled 3 wickets and Steyn who handled the lower order well and got 2 wickets. The team is out of the semi-finals but it seems that they want to make it difficult for the others too.
