It was a royal challenge between the Royal Challengers Bangalore and Kolkata Knight Riders. RCB won the toss and chose to bat first. What an excellent decision it turned out to be! Finch and Padikkal were brilliant right from the beginning, maintaining a very good run rate. Padikkal was dismissed for 32 and Finch got out for 47, missing his half-century. It was Ab de Villiers and Virat Kohli from then on. Both of them smashed the balls everywhere and kept the scoreboard ticking.

AB de Villiers played one of his best innings. With five fours and six sixes, he scored an unbeaten 73 off just 33 balls and the umpires had to ask for new balls every now and then since he was hitting it out of the ground every time he went big. The shots from the South African were awe-inspiring with one of his sixes had gone outside the stadium, pitched on the highway, and hit a running car and his play had served rejoicing treat to the RCB fans and proved that why he has been called as a world-class player. 

Kohli played a sensible innings scoring 33 runs from 28 balls giving most of the strike to AB as he was in a sublime form. RCB was all set to cross the 200 run mark but just fell short of six runs in the end. They scored 194 runs for the loss of only two wickets in their 20 overs.

KKR is a strong batting unit that is capable of chasing any score. But this time, they lost their top 5 batsmen for 64 runs with Shubman Gill being the only batsman to score a well-made 34 runs. They were not this inconsistent in their previous matches and the much expected Dinesh Karthik also failed to perform. Andre Russell, who is yet to give his best in the series, was expected to take his team home. But nothing could do the magic as the KKR were losing back to back wickets including that of Russel who was back to the pavilion with 16 runs.

RCB hadn't lost its tenacity in constraining the Knight Riders in chasing the score as Kohli's army had unleashed some of the best bowling attacks and applied brakes for the KKR batsmen and turned the match under their complete control. RCB's spinners Washington Sundar and Yuzvendra Chahal had added one more match to the tally of delivering best matches. Both of them had attacked KKR batting line-up and controlled them from scoring big. 

Sundar had ended his four-over spell with 20 for two wickets while Chahal had one of his best IPL spells after he ended by giving 12 runs with one wicket. Pacer Chris Morris had helped the spinners in keeping the game under RCB's control and the KKR conceded the defeat after they ended up by scoring 112 for 9 in 20 overs through which the RCB had registered one of the historical victories. At the current state, RCB stands at third place in the points table with ten points. They had played seven matches and won five whereas KKR is in fourth place by winning four out of seven matches. 

The KKR had lost the game to the RCB by 82 runs, a very big margin in the T20s. Though both the teams are in the third and fourth spots respectively in the points table, anything can change since this is one of the most unpredictable formats ever. This victory of RCB can be credited to the fantastic batting display of AB de Villiers and the brilliant captaincy of Virat Kohli, without any second thoughts and by proving its capacity again in building the winning momentum, RCB has been drawing huge attention in the current season with the fans strongly hope that this season is for RCB and with such a historical victory, Kohli's army is racing towards the play-offs with a never seen before consistency in their batting and bowling.

Speaking in the post-match presentation ceremony, Virat Kohli said, "This pitch was drier and the day was pleasant so we thought there would be no dew. Barring one superhuman, every batsman struggled on the pitch. The talk was around getting 165, but we got 194 you know exactly why. It was unbelievable. You might not see a lot of people do what is done in other games, but only AB can do what he did. It was a fabulous knock". 

 

Tremendous effort by the boys. We march on. 👍🏻 #PlayBold @RCBTweets pic.twitter.com/0AXdC0RIgP

— Virat Kohli (@imVkohli) October 12, 2020