IPL 2020: Match 38 – KXIP vs DC – Who Said What

Delhi Capitals and Kings XI Punjab came up to lock horns in the 38th match of the Indian Premier League 2020. KXIP registered a convincing victory by five wickets and kept their playoffs hopes alive. While batting first, the entire order failed terribly, but ace batsman Shikhar Dhawan came up as their messiah. He smashed his second straight century in IPL (106* off 61) to help Delhi post a respectable 164/5 on the board.

Shikhar Dhawan was named as the player of the match for his scintillating ton. Mohammed Shami again spearheaded Punjab’s pace attack perfectly as he picked two wickets and conceded 28 runs off his spell. Glenn Maxwell also remained quite economical while getting one scalp to his name.

Chasing the target in Dubai, the exceptional opening stand of KL Rahul and Mayank Agarwal couldn’t get anything significant for the team. However, Nicholas Pooran hit a prolific half-century (53 off 28) to get his team going. Chris Gayle (29 off 13) and Glenn Maxwell (32 off 24) added significant cameos from their end. Kagiso Rabada and Ravi Ashwin displayed an economical show to pick two and one wicket, respectively.

Losing skipper, Shreyas Iyer said

I feel that we fell around 10 runs short, but we got a lot of learnings from this game. Shikhar’s batting was a positive. Tushar leaked runs but that happens to the best of us. I’m sure he will come back. Shikhar read the wicket well, adapted to the situation, he went hard from Ball 1, and passed the message onto the youngsters that the wicket is stopping. He acclimatised to the conditions quicker the others. The good thing is that the boys will be charged up for the next game. We weren’t up to the mark tonight, but I’m sure we will be next time.

Winning skipper, KL Rahul said

Specially when you play with 6 batters and one all-rounder. One of the top four had to do the job. One thing that we need to look at. Shami was coming in after some confidence from the last game. Arshdeep bowled two overs in the powerplay and one over at the death. And he nailed 6 yorkers. Glenn has been batting well in the nets. He is a great team man and we know the balance he brings to the table. The talk before the last couple of games was to beat two teams were at the top of the points table. I couldn’t sleep after the last game. We could have finished it before and not allowed it to go into the Super Over. The game reminds us to stay humble. We would want to take the momentum forward and take it one game at a time.

Player of the match, Shikhar Dhawan said

Today, it happened that way. I took the responibility of holding one end up. One my Test debut I remember I was scoring this frequently. I took proper rest and was fresh for this match. I didn’t know. We gonna have a discussion and see where we can improve. We have been playing very good quite consistently. This is not going to put us down. We would try to ome back stronger.