Kolkata : Punjab Kings defeated Kolkata Knight Riders by 16 runs, defending just 112 runs on April 15, 2025, lowest total in IPL 2025, leaving head coach Ricky remark that this was his best win as IPL coach.
In era of T20 Cricket, where even 250s are chased down, PBKS defended just 112 runs against formidable KKR Batting line up.
Batting first they just put 111 on board, in 2nd innings, things turned when Yuzvendra Chahal grabbed 4-fer , collapsing KKR Batting lineup, and Marco Jansen doing rest , clearing the tail, bundling KKR on just 95 runs in an amazing win, where no one, not even Ponting thought.
“The heart rate still up a bit for me – it’s probably up over 200,” Ponting told the broadcaster soon after the game. “I don’t need many of those games like that at my age of over 50 now”.
It is also to be noted that same PBKS couldn’t defend 245 runs against Sunrises Hyderabad just few days back.
“It just goes to show how funny a game it is. Only three days ago we couldn’t defend 246 [245] and here we are, defending 112 [111] with 16 runs up our sleeves. We actually said to the guys at the halfway mark that really small chases like this are sometimes the hardest. The wicket wasn’t easy. You can see right through the game it was holding up.
“But what about [Yuzvendra] Chahal tonight! How good a spell of bowling was that! We’ve actually put it on him a bit during the week. He had a fitness test before the game today with his shoulder injury that he picked up in the last game and I grabbed him at the warm-up, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Mate, are you OK?’ He said, ‘Coach, I’m 100% alright, let me out there’, and what a spell of bowling.”
When asked what was the talk in the dressing room at the innings break, Ponting said: “Well, you can probably see the way we changed things up with the ball as well, with Marco [Jansen] taking the first over and [Xavier] Bartlett the second. Normally, it’s been a role for Arshdeep [Singh] with the brand new ball, but the match-ups tonight suggested that Jansen and Bartlett were better suited.
“But we just said that wins like this are always the sweetest ones. If we can pull this off, then this would be as good as a win most guys have probably been involved in. I’ve coached a lot of games in the IPL and that might just be about the best win that I’ve ever had.”
Ponting said his team’s batting, shot selection and decision-making were “all poor“, but what impressed him the most was how the team turned things around in the chase because their bowling, fielding and catching had been under the scanner for a few games.
“We just said that wins like this are always the sweetest ones. If we can pull this off, then this would be as good as a win most guys have probably been involved in”, Ricky Ponting said.
“Even if we had lost that game, I couldn’t have been more proud of the way we went about the second half,” he said. “But when I saw us take the field, we got a couple of wickets early on and what we’ve been lacking is a bit of belief with the ball and a bit of energy in the field, and that was there for everyone to see tonight. So if we had gone down in a really close one, I would have been telling the guys that I actually thought that that was a season-defining moment”, Ponting concluded.
