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The biggest carnival of Indian cricket is back for its 12th edition. The stage was perfectly set as Chennai Super Kings and Royal Challengers Bangalore were pitted against each other in the IPL season opener. The expectations from the opening match were high but the match ended up to be Bangalore's annihilation at the hands of Chennai.
MS Dhoni sprung a surprise after winning the toss as CSK chose to feature just three overseas players - Shane Watson, Dwayne Bravo, and Imran Tahir. RCB, on the other hand, went onto to bolster their batting with 4 foreign players - AB de Villiers, Shimron Hetmyer, Moeen Ali, and Colin de Grandhomme.
Chennai's opening bowlers - Deepak Chahar and Harbhajan Singh - were consistent with their lines and lengths. In his spell of four overs, Harbhajan gave away just 20 runs and took the 3 important wickets of Virat Kohli, Moeen Ali, and AB de Villiers.
Singh also benefitted from the pressure applied at the other end by Chahar. The surmounting pressure also induced the run-out of IPL debutant Shimron Hetmyer. As a result, RCB were struggling at 39 for 4 at the end of 8 overs.
With the pitch providing assistance to spinners, MS Dhoni opted to use Imran Tahir and Ravindra Jadeja in tandem after the one over by Suresh Raina. Tahir and Jadeja further spun the game away from the Bangalore team by picking up 3 and 2 wickets respectively.
While the rest of the batsmen got out at the other end, a helpless Parthiv Patel did his best by scoring 29 runs. Dwayne Bravo who was introduced for the first time in the 18th over picked up Parthiv's wicket and ended RCB's struggle. In the end, RCB were bowled out for 70 runs, their joint second lowest score in IPL history.
On a spin-friendly pitch, Royal Challengers Bangalore had only two spin bowling options and that made things easy for Chennai. The home team handled RCB's spinners cautiously and gave them just a wicket each. As a result, Yuzvendra Chahal and Moeen Ali ended up with the figures of 4-1-6-1 and 4-0-19-1 respectively.
Of the three seamers used by Bangalore, only Mohammad Siraj achieved some success. The pacer picked up the wicket of Rayudu in the fifteenth over but the damage was done till then.
In the end, Chennai Super Kings won the match by 7 wickets and with 14 balls to spare. While the defending champions had a field day at the Chepauk, the Kohli-led Bangalore must put this loss behind their backs and regroup before their next match against Mumbai Indians.
Twitter reacted as RCB got thrashed by CSK in the opening match:
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