Glenn Maxwell and David Miller batted for a ball apiece, George Bailey faced two, while Virender Sehwag failed to repeat his heroics from the last game. Together, they contributed just nine runs and yet Kings XI Punjab put one short of 200 on the board.
Take a bow Wriddhiman Saha, the first man to score a century in an IPL final. Diminutive in size, the 29 year old put a few giants of Twenty20 cricket in the shade with some lusty hitting in his knock of 115, which came off a mere 55 balls.
Sunil Narine, the meanest bowler in the IPL, was treated with contempt and carted for three sixes and three fours. His 18 balls to Saha were smacked for 35 runs. The rest of the Kolkata Knight Riders attack was treated no better. Morne Morkel went for nine from his three balls, Umesh Yadav conceded 26 from 10 and Piyush Chawla 32 of 13.
And the Punjab wicketkeeper did not even get started till the 11th over. After 10 overs, the Kings had just 58 on the board and Saha had scored only 15 from the first 17 balls he faced, with a lone boundary.
In the next 38 balls, he scored a 100, smashing eight huge sixes along the way and nine fours. Saha crossed into three figures with a maximum off Narine, the man who had dropped him off his own bowling when the batsman was on 60 off 33 balls.
It was a costly miss, but it was that kind of a day for Kolkata on the field.
Thankfully, they were a lot better with the bat. The final was meant to be a contest between the best batting line-up of the tournament against the best bowling unit, with the big stars coming to the party.
The lesser lights, however, yanked the spotlight.
If Maxwell, Miller and Sehwag were overshadowed by Saha, Manish Pandey eclipsed the likes of Robin Uthappa, the highest run-scorer of this tournament, Yusuf Pathan, Shakib Al Hasan and Gautam Gambhir.
Pandey, the first Indian to score a century in the IPL when he scored 114 for the Royal Challengers Bangalore at the Centurion in the 2009 edition, missed the three-figure mark by six runs, but his magnificent 50-ball 94 did the job for the 2012 champions.
Some pedestrian bowling by the Punjab quicks – Mitchell Johnson, Parwinder Awana and L Balaji – helped their cause as well. The three conceded 125 runs from their 11.3 overs. When Pandey departed at the end of the 17th over, KKR needed only 21 runs from three over and another lesser light, Chawla, clobbered Johnson for a six in the penultimate over, then completed the win with a four in the final.
Chawla then raced around like a crazed man. Saha, on the other hand, walked off dejected, head bowed. Being a wicketkeeper in India these days is not the most glamorous of jobs in cricket, with a certain MS Dhoni in business. Had Punjab won last night, Saha might have just walked out of the shadows.
But unfortunately, defeat means a great knock will be quickly forgotten.
arizvi@thenational.ae
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