Chennai crush Bangalore to retain trophy
Chennai Super Kings retained the IPL trophy by beating Royal Challengers Bangalore by 58 runs. Chennai's captain MS Dhoni won the toss and chose to bat first, which proved to be the most crucial decision of the match.
Michael Hussey and Murali Vijay shared an opening partnership of 159, which is the best opening score in this year's tournament.
Hussey was the first to go for 65 off the bowling of Abhimanyu Mithun. And Vijay fell five short of a century when he was caught off the bowling of Sreentah Aravind.
Chennai looked on course for a score of around 230 but Bangalore did manage to restrict them to 205. Chris Gayle got Albie Morkel and Suresh Raina in succesive balls in the final over but a last-ball six from Dwayne Bravo meant Bangalore had to chase 206.
And it was task too great for Daniel Vettori's side from the first over. Gayle, the man who everyone was talking about prior to the match, was dismissed for a duck off the bowling of Ravichandran Ashwin who finished with figures of 3-16.
Mayank Agarwalfell to Ashwin in the third over and when Virat Kohliwas trapped lbw by Raina in the seventh it was clear Chennai were going to win with ease.
Bangalore managed to bat out their 20 overs and Saurabh Tiwary hit a six off the final ball of the match to finish on 42 off 34.
But the six was forgotten almost instantly as Chennai were celebrating their second IPL trophy in as many years.
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A pretty important win for us, it will boost our run-rate and we may need that to come into the equation. It's a bit of a surprise to be honest [the knock], but you need to keep trusting yourself. Twenty20 cricket is a funny game. Virat has got his whole cricketing life ahead of him and I'd say that to any youngster. It was a nicer batting track today, we felt it's a small ground and we might be able to make up for any slow overs early on. Marsh has also turned into a dominator. Once we got to the 10-11 over mark, the track had settled down and it was an intentional decision to keep going hard. We've got to win our next game, we've taken about half a run up in the net run-rate."