MOHALI: Chris Gayle did it again. The West Indian smashed 87 in just 56 balls to deliver a five-wicket win to Royal Challengers Bangalore over Kings XI Punjab, at Mohali last night. Chasing Punjab’s 163, Bangalore looked down for the count when they lost three wickets for precious little on the board. But Gayle and A.B. de Villiers (52, 39b, 6×4) added 131, for the fourth wicket in a shade under 13 overs to salvage their team from what appeared a certain defeat.
In the end Vijay Mallya scored over Preity Zinta. Well, not really, but you get the drift. Now that this vital nugget of information has been dispensed with, let us confess that it’s all getting a little too much.
It’s hard enough for addled, sleep-deprived brains to keep track of the international calendar, let alone almost two months of the IPL, which generates cliff-hangers and duds by the dozen, aside from too much contrived information disseminated by loud-mouths you wouldn’t ever tune into voluntarily.
This particular game lay somewhere between excitement and dreariness. For a short phase – and any phase in T20 cricket can’t be anything but that – the match threatened to descend into mediocrity, the slow-burning, one-sided, low-scoring variety, far from the gratuitous adrenaline rush typical of this format.
It took Azhar Mahmood, who turned back the clock in his 14-ball 33, to light up the evening, but the night belonged, once again, to Gayle, who decided to eschew risks at the start of his innings before erupting into a frenzy of big hits as the script panned out.
Still, we wouldn’t really blame you if, a few months hence, you’ve forgotten what happened on this fine evening on the outskirts of Chandigarh; how Pakistan  veteran Azhar Mahmood cast aside his visa quandaries to play a sizzling cameo; how Gayle went against his natural instinct of going for the big heaves right from the get go; how Zinta stood on the sidelines chewing nail by manicured nail as Bangalore moved purposefully towards the target.
Nor would we judge the viewer for failing to remember, some days from now, that it was the domestic workhorse Parwinder Awana’s wicket-to-wicket bowling, which allowed the team from Le Corbusier city to scupper Bangalore’s chase well before it had gained any impetus.
Or that Paul Valthaty, the sensation from last season, failed again; or that nobody, save for the half-centurions, reached double figures for Bangalore.
Seriously, how much of a good is too much of a good thing? We don’t know yet. What matters is that Bangalore, driven by Gayle-force winds, made another competitive total look woefully short, and Punjab, despite giving it their all, failed to gain any points from this particular home fixture.
Last word to Gayle, whose only concern – ‘Thank God nobody got hit today’ – was far from the outcome of the match. (Yahoo Cricket)