News Sports Cricket IPL 8, Week-1 Review: Paradise for batters, graveyard for bowlers

IPL 8, Week-1 Review: Paradise for batters, graveyard for bowlers

New Delhi: The Twenty-20 cricket is known as a batsmen game and the opening week of IPL 8 have justified this fact. Amid the thrills and spills in first seven days of the eighth season

The story continued in the second match when Chennai Super Kings were restricted to a modest total of 150 by Delhi Daredevils but their bowlers had to fight hard to save the match. Albie Morkel stayed on the crease till the last ball with 73 off 55 balls but unfortunately the team lost by just 1 run.

Rajasthan Royals's win against Kings XI Punjab was probably the only match where bowlers did a decent job. Punjab restricted Royals to 162 with the help of Anureet Singh's 3 wickets and later some good bowling show by Faulkner and co. of Rajasthan took the team home by 26 runs.

CSK's Brendon McCullum scored the first hundred of IPL 8 against Sunrisers Hyderabad while skipper MS Dhoni too played a 29 ball 53 that also saw the first 200-plus total of this season. However it was not the difficult job for CSK to restrict SRH for 164.

Gautam Gambhir scored yet another half century against RCB while Andre Russell to played a crucial knock of 41 off just 17, but Chris Gayle blasted away 96 runs to jolt the KKR bowling attack. Their mystery spinner went wicketless in both the games while South Africa World Cup star Morne Morkel also could not do enough. Three out of seven KKR bowlers conceded runs above the economy of 10. The total of 177 was a good total but the bowlers could not defend as it was the day of Gayle-storm in Kolkata.