Kolkata Knight Riders 247 for 2 (Allen 93, Raghuvanshi 82*, Green 52*) beat Gujarat Titans 218 for 4 (Gill 85, Buttler 57, Sai Sudharsan 53*, Narine 2-29) by 29 runs

Allen cancels out GT’s toss advantage

At the toss, GT captain Gill suggested that the pitch might start out “sticky” before easing out, and he proved spot-on with his assessment. In the early overs, KKR’s batters couldn’t quite find their timing with Mohammed Siraj and Kagiso Rabada extracting a little bit of seam and a little bit of spongy bounce. The first two overs produced just eight runs.

Allen got going with back-to-back fours off Siraj in the third over – one was off the inside edge – but could have fallen next ball had Jason Holder been able to cling onto a one-hander at extra-cover. Allen was on 14 at that point.

The ball continued to do a little bit through the powerplay, and KKR ended it at 56 for 1, with Allen on 31 off 15 and Raghuvanshi, new to the crease, having shown his intent with a scooped six over his own head off Rabada.

Neither team would have believed they were on top at this stage. The match shifted decisively in KKR’s favour towards the end of the seventh over. Holder got a hard-length ball to climb awkwardly at Allen, and he swatted it straight to long-on, where Siraj put down a sitter. Next ball, Raghuvanshi whipped Holder for a big six over backward square leg.

That was the first of ten sixes that KKR hit over the next 23 legal balls they faced. Allen hit eight of them, and it didn’t matter if he was facing pace or spin. If the ball was remotely in his arc, he used his reach and launched it straight and clean with the purest of bat-swings. If it was remotely short, he rocked back and pulled anywhere in the arc from fine leg to wide long-on.

That frenetic period of play completely cancelled out KKR’s somewhat slow start, and the disadvantage they may have had of batting in the trickiest conditions of the match.

Raghuvanshi and Green take over

R Sai Kishore, bowling his left-arm spin from over the wicket, got Allen to hole out to deep midwicket in the 12th over, seven short of his second hundred of the season. If GT thought they could breathe a little easier, though, they were wrong, because Green and Raghuvanshi continued to find the boundary regularly.

And GT continued to be generous on the field. Arshad Khan dropped Green on 23 in the 16th over, and Washington Sundar put down a low but eminently catchable chance at deep backward square leg to reprieve Raghuvanshi on 52.

As the innings went deeper, Raghuvanshi began to show his range, hitting Siraj for three sixes in the 19th over – an inside-out loft over extra-cover, a scoop over fine leg, a sweep over backward square – as well as a reverse-swipe for four. Having taken 33 balls to get to his fifty, he scored 29 off his last 11 balls.

Green, meanwhile, reached his fifty off 26 balls, getting there with a slog-sweep off Rashid Khan in the final over, which ran away to the boundary via a misfield. A last-ball overthrow completed GT’s woes, as Raghuvanshi and Green walked off having put on an unbroken 108 off 53 balls.

Narine wraps up KKR’s victory

GT made as good a start as they could have hoped for, but when Sai Sudharsan went off injured at the end of the third over, their momentum began to deflate. First, Pathirana – bowling for the first time this season, and bowling in the powerplay for the first time in his IPL career – sent down a seven-run fourth over. Then Sunil Narine, playing his 200th IPL game, came on and struck first ball, getting Nishant Sindhu – who had been promoted above Buttler to keep the left-right partnership going – to hole out to long-off.

Narine conceded just two runs off that over and bowled four straight balls to Gill without conceding a run off the bat.

Gill hit two sixes off Narine’s next over, but by then GT were already falling well behind the required rate. And this story continued. The good overs – such as the 18-run ninth over bowled by Anukul Roy – were surrounded by not-so-good ones – such as the eighth over, from Varun Chakravarthy, that went for just five. Green and Kartik Tyagi were able to extract bounce and a bit of grip by bowling cutters into the surface, and Buttler struggled for timing against both of them.

When Allen had been at the crease, KKR had four straight overs – from the eighth to the 11th of their innings – that brought them 15 or more runs. GT only had two such overs in the first 14 overs of their innings. Gill hit Varun for two sixes and two fours in that 14th over, but KKR immediately responded by bringing back Narine and bowling out his last two overs.

His first one went for 11, and that was still well short of the 16 an over that GT now needed. And his second – the 17th of the innings – pretty much sealed the game: five runs, and the wicket of Gill, caught on the boundary looking to sweep one of those fast, into-the-pitch, stump-to-stump Narine deliveries that generations of IPL batters have tried and failed to master.