Chennai Super Kings, in one of the most unusually slow innings, sealed the season opener of the IPL 2019 by 7 wickets against Royal Challengers Bangalore. The CSK batting took it to 18th over of the innings to chase a small total of 71 runs losing 3 wickets.
Watson fell for a nought, after facing 10 deliveries, to Yuzvendra Chahal who was extremely economic in his four overs giving just 6 runs in his quota of four overs.
Moeen Ali was also very effective but with lack of one more spin option, Virat's RCB couldn't hold CSK to take it till the last over.
Virat Kohli, expressing his disappointment over the loss in the very first encounter, said, "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, it wasn't easy to bat on, looked much better surface though, 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. He (Saini) has been good in conditions where there's some grass, got his chance now. I thought CSK played really well, they deserved to win, but I loved to see our team fighting all the way".
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CSK's highest scorer Ambati Rayudu told in the post-match conference that Chepauk was a difficult wicket to bat on and if RCB had scored 30-40 more runs, it would have been very difficult to chase it down.
"No not really, 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 mroe than a normal match. But we were really surprised by how slow the wicket was. The wicket definitely needs to be much better, even with dew it was spinning big. 90, 90, 100 is really low-scoring and if you have geniune spinners in your lineup you can create a lot of trouble," said the winning captain MS Dhoni.