The Chennai Super Kings have been an efficient, consistent bunch in the IPL for the past four years. However, it is int he last two years that they have shown that they are champion material, yet again being thei rbest into play in the IPL 4 final in Chennai against the raw, flamboyant favourites,the Royal Challengers Bangalore.
The Chennai Super Kings hurt the Royal Challengers Bangalore where it hurt most – in the opening batting. While teams would have planned howto bowl to curb Chris Gayle for the Royal Challengers Bangalore, the Chennai Super Kings counterattacked with their own set of opening batsmen.
Murali Vijay turned it on and Michael Hussey fell nicely into the slipstream. Together the duo began to sniff out the hopes of the Royal Challengers Bangalore by galloping at a pace that the RCB bowlers including the likes of the RCB captain, Daniel Vettori, and Sreenath Arvind failed to contain. The humidity hurt both the Chennai Super Kings batsmen, and it was unfortunate that Vijay could not make the IPL century in the final, although he was clearly the more outstanding of the two dynamic batsmen on the day. Hussey though was not far behind, making sixty-three valuable runs from forty-five balls, clearing the boundary on three occasions to ensure that Chennai continued to put the visitors under tremendous pressure.
The sixes rained down in by the dozen as Vijay hit six sixes in his ninety-five runs off only fifty-two balls. His partnership with Hussey never allowed the RCB to try and establish a couple of quite overs and it came back to haunt the Royal Challengers Bangalore. With the two openers raising 159 in only fifteen overs,the gauntlet was thrown to the RCB team to overhaul a huge total. To their credit, they managed to pick up the Chennai wickets in the end because they could have easily been chasing 230 instead of 206 for their maiden IPL victory.
But even then the match seemed balance because with Chris Gayle in the RCB line up, the match could have been closer. However, the Chennai team were not done plotting.Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the Chennai Super Kings captain, not only showed initiative in coming in to bat at no.3 but also, was brave enough to call upon Ravichandran Ashwin to bowl the first over yet again. Even as Chris Gayle saw off two balls carefully with the pitch aiding turn, he could not avoid a third,and with his wicket, the Chennai crowds turned delirious.
Although Royal Challengers Bangalore were expected to fight back through the likes of Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers put up a valiant resistance with thirty-five runs while Saurabh Tiwary made desperate efforts for forty-two runs after the ship had already set sail. The Chennai Super Kings bowlers were all over the RCB batting, picking wickets all too easily at whim and reducing them to six down for seventy in ten overs with the wicket of the RCB captain. Ashwin and Shadab Jakati shared five wickets between them as the result was a foregone conclusion.
RCB battedout their quota twenty overs, making147 and losing by fifty-eight runs. But by then the match had become a farce because the Chennai team defended their totalto look as if the RCB were chasing 250. In the end the Chennai Super Kings lived up to their reputation of being champions, snaring their second IPL trophy by winning the IPL 4.
