On this day in 2016 - RCB beat Gujarat Lions by 144 runs

The 2016 season was one of two contrasting halves for the Royal Challengers Bangalore. The first half was laced with only two victories. Despite two consecutive wins to kick off the second half of the league stage, an insipid performance at home to the Mumbai Indians had slowed down RCB’s momentum. Now with only four games left to turn the fortunes around, RCB were up against table-toppers Gujarat Lions on an evening when the Chinnaswamy had turned green.

They’d say win the toss at the Chinnaswamy and field first. They’d say get Gayle out early and you are well on your way to a win against RCB. Gujarat Lions did both. By the end of the fourth over, RCB were struggling at 19/1 with Gayle dismissed. On a Sunday evening with the sun playing hide and seek behind the grey clouds, the Chinnaswamy stood witness to perhaps one of, if not the greatest hour of batting one could wish to see.

When AB de Villiers and Virat Kohli bat together, it often is a symphony. It is like watching Messi tear through the opposition and Ronaldo running down the wings. De Villiers looked in ominous form right from the get-go. Off only the second ball he faced, he lofted a shortish ball off the backfoot over covers, leaving Shivil Kaushik stunned. The Kohli-Virat duo kept the scoreboard ticking at a fair pace until the time they could explode. The score after eleven overs being 81 probably lulled the Gujarat bowlers into a false sense of security.

With nine overs to go, the floodgates opened. Dhawal Kulkarni was the first victim; 22 runs came off the 12th over, de Villiers taking 15 of them to reach his half-century in only 26 balls. The next three overs yielded 33 runs, and the innings which was going at around 7.5 an over was now chugging along at just above 9. With five overs to go, RCB were now in a healthy position at 136/1 with a set Kohli and de Villiers batting.

The Virat-ABD stand put on 229 runs off 96 balls, with both batsmen scoring centuries

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One could consider, perhaps, 60 runs from the last 5 overs as a good return; 70 runs? well, a bit optimistic but on the best days, achievable at a venue like the Chinnaswamy. But, no one, not even the most optimistic of the Royal Challengers fans, would have guessed what was to ensue. To give a glimpse of the carnage, Ravindra Jadeja’s final over, the 17th of the innings went for 14 runs, and that was the most economical of the last 5. One can quickly run out of adjectives to describe Kohli and De Villiers’ batting. On an evening such as this, one would need to invent new words. De Villiers reached his hundred in 43 balls.

If one thought it was going to be the De Villiers show alone, one would be mistaken. With three overs to go, Virat Kohli was batting on 52 off 41 balls. To even imagine that one could reach a century from that position would be criminal, but Kohli made the impossible, possible. Kohli got to his century by the time he faced 12 more balls. To put the mauling into context, the fastest ever T20 fifty, that scored by Yuvraj Singh took the same amount of time, and that included six sixers in an over. The last five overs had taken hitting to another level. An unprecedented 112 runs had been scored, two of the overs going for 30 each. RCB had more than tripled their score from the 11th over mark and finished the innings at 248/3. The Virat-AB partnership had scored 229 runs off 16 overs.

The Gujarat batsmen gave the feeling that their will had been pummelled out of them. They tried to replicate the hitting prowess displayed by two of the greatest ever to have graced the game but failed miserably in their attempt. Dwayne Smith was bowled by Aravind in the second over of the innings, and when McCullum lofted Chahal into the hands of de Villiers at long-off, the Gujarat innings began to slide downwards. They lost 5 more wickets and their entire middle order was back in the hut within their next 32 runs. The Gujarat tail did its best to hang around at the crease and limit the damage to their Net Run Rate. They were eventually dismissed for 104. RCB had won by a massive margin of 144 runs. Gujarat Lions had seen RED on a green evening at the Chinnaswamy.