Narine stars with bat and ball, puts KKR in Qualifier 2, ends Kohli's tenure as RCB captain with defeat
It was one of the great IPL all-round performances, as Narine's 4 for 21 and 15-ball 26 swung, and changed, the match
Virat Kohli. Clean bowled. AB de Villiers. Clean Bowled. Glenn Maxwell. Completely deceived. Most people need a cheat code and a computer screen to pull that off. Narine doesn't. He imposed video game logic on this real life game and turned it in Knight Riders' favour.
Doing de Villiers required a bit more subtlety. Royal Challengers' talisman had come out with a plan. It involved thrusting his front foot outside off stump to eliminate lbw, and playing across it. Narine, though, spotted the smallest gap between bat and pad and he targeted it with missile-like precision. Pace, drift, length and spin - everything came together as de Villiers played all around an offbreak and lost his middle stump.
Kohli wanted this one badly. He got in the face of the umpire when he made a poor decision. When the resulting DRS proved how plumb the lbw was he roared like only he can. He had said this would be his last season as captain in the IPL. He would have imagined signing off with that big shiny trophy. So he kept going to his match-winners.
Alagappan Muthu is a sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo