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Eyebrows were raised when MS Dhoni won the toss and elected to field first on a pitch which was expected to help the spinners. The CSK captain backed his bowlers to do the damage early on so his batsmen would have fewer runs to chase.
The plan was a huge success as RCB's batsmen had no answer to CSK's potent spin-attack. First, it was the legendary off spinner Harbhajan Singh who rolled back the years. The Turbanator destroyed the top order of RCB, picking up the wickets of Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers and Moeen Ali; a blow from which RCB never recovered.
Then, it was the turn of Imran Tahir and Ravindra Jadeja to spin a web around the hapless RCB batsmen. Imran Tahir took three wickets and gave away just nine runs in his quota of four overs. Ravindra Jadeja also joined the party as he made sure that he built pressure from the other end. No one except Parthiv Patel showed any signs of fight as Virat Kohli's men folded up for a paltry 70.
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This small target was never going to be a cause for concern for the defending champions. The home team started the chase on a cautious note but eventually chased down the target with ease.
Here is how the world reacted to the IPL opener:
Virat Kohli: No one wants to start like this, but it's good to get a game like this out of the way - this early in the tournament. We spoke of trying to be in the game, taking it to the 18th over was nice to see.
The batting wasn't good, the pitch wasn't easy to bat on, I thought 140-150 would have been an ideal score, especially with dew expected later on. A scrappy start to the league, but I don't think either team had control over it, the pitch was under the covers for 4 days, but we should have batted better, 110-120 would have been a fighting score.
MS Dhoni: I wasn't sure about the wicket. We played a practice match on this wicket and it was a high scoring match, but usually in practice matches we score 30 runs more than a normal match.
But we were really surprised by how slow the wicket was. It reminded me of a Champions League wicket in 2011 after we won the IPL. The wicket definitely needs to be much better, even with dew it was spinning big. 80, 90, 100 is really low-scoring and if you have genuine spinners in your lineup you can create a lot of trouble.
Harbhajan's is one slot and we'll shuffle it around. He would never mind bowling on such wickets. Other teams have good spinners as well and this isn't the pitch we are looking forward to.
Harbhajan Singh: I have learnt quite a lot while sitting next to the legends in the commentary box. It is nice to be out there in the park and it is a special one for me.
I would like to give a lot of credit to my wife and daughter for this award. You can't ask for a better start - they had a lot of left-handers and Fleming told me that I would be playing and bowling in the power-play. It was nice to get a wicket up front and it gets easier after that. Nice to get the Man of the Match award in the first match and hopefully we can carry on from here.
Ramesh Srivats:
Gaurav Kalra:
Deepu Narayanan:
Ayaz Memon:
Lawrence Booth:
Glenn McGrath:
Harsha Bhogle:
Bharath Seervi:
Aakash Chopra:
Anand Vasu:
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