VIDEO | Flying Dinesh Karthik takes stunning one-handed grab to leave Stokes mortified
Dinesh Karthik grabbed the catch of the season
|@ IPL T20
Dinesh Karthik has had a rough IPL 2020 - he’s relinquished captaincy, he’s seen his own fanbase turn on him and he’s found it impossible to buy a run all season. But in what could arguably be the most important moment of KKR’s season, the ex-skipper produced a scarcely believable moment of magic.
191 in a do-or-die match is a score teams would take 99.99% of the time if you offer them, but today in Dubai, Kolkata Knight Riders were sceptical about their own score despite being only 9 runs short of 200. The reason? Well, they needed to win by at least a 73-run margin to seal qualification without depending on any other result.
The task looked impossible and the way Ben Stokes started Rajasthan’s chase made things worse. The Englishman, who was coming on the back of a century and a fifty, struck a four and a six in the very first over and it looked like qualification was slipping away from KKR right in front of their eyes. They needed a moment of magic to stay alive in the competition and well, they got it from a man who their fans denounced as one of their own, Dinesh Karthik.
Eyeing to chase the target of 192 in under 15 overs, Stokes, on the first ball of the third over, went for an extravagant cover drive off the bowling of Pat Cummins. What ensued was a thick edge off Stokes’ bat but to the naked eye, initially, the edge was so thick that it almost felt certain that the ball was going to race past the keeper and fly to the boundary. But well, here is where DK put up a divine intervention
As the ball looked all set to speed towards the boundary, the keeper DK thrust himself up in the air and stuck his left hand out in an attempt to grab the ball. 9/10 times such catches never stick but so on point was the timing of DK’s jump that out of thin air, remarkably, the 35-year-old plucked the catch. With his fingertips - similar to how Dhoni held on to a Sanju Samson catch last week - DK held the ball and completed what was perhaps the most important catch of his IPL career.
And yes, like many have observed, it was indeed reminiscent of his catch of Graeme Smith in the 2007 T20 World Cup. What a player. What a catch.
