Kolkata Knight Riders won their third IPL title, beating SunRisers Hyderabad by eight wickets in the IPL 2024 final at the MA Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai on Sunday.
Twelve years after winning their first title at the same venue against the Chennai Super Kings, KKR, led by Shreyas Iyer, thumped SRH in a one- sided contest.
After Sunrisers skipper Pat Cummins opted to bat first on a red-soil surface, Kolkata struck early with Mitchell Starc and Vaibhav Arora removing their deadly openers. While Starc castled Sharma in the first over, Arora dismissed the deadly Head for a third duck in four innings before KKR seized complete momentum. Andre Russell and the spinners neutralised the middle-order, with the West Indies quick scalping three wickets for 19 runs.
SRH were reduced to 113 in 18.3 overs – the lowest score in an IPL final – before the Knights romped home in a breezy chase. Led by Venkatesh Iyer’s quickfire fifty in 24 balls, KKR trumped Sunrisers for the third time this season.
Venkatesh also became KKR’s most prolific run-scorer in IPL Playoffs, crossing 200 runs in only five innings. Though opener Rahmanullah Gurbaz was controversially dismissed leg-before in the absence of the DRS system, Venkatesh went on to hit the winning runs as KKR secured the title with an unbeaten streak extending to six completed matches.
Kolkata Knight Riders Playing XI: Rahmanullah Gurbaz (wk), Sunil Narine, Venkatesh Iyer, Shreyas Iyer (c), Rinku Singh, Andre Russell, Ramandeep Singh, Mitchell Starc, Vaibhav Arora, Harshit Rana, Varun Chakaravarthy.
Sunrisers Hyderabad Playing XI: Travis Head (substituted by Abdul Samad), Abhishek Sharma, Rahul Tripathi, Aiden Markram, Nitish Reddy, Heinrich Klaasen (wk), Shahbaz Ahmed, Pat Cummins (c), Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Jaydev Unadkat, T Natarajan.
