"It was an important toss to win. We would have also wanted to bowl first, but this was a good performance from the Punjab bowlers and you cannot take the credit out of the Kings XI," Ganguly said after the match. "We should have shown a bit more commonsense and get to 140; it should have been a good total. We had 115 runs on [the] board and we needed to be a lot more smarter," he added.
Sourav Ganguly sold Jesse Ryder down the river in the second over when he was two thirds of the way down the track, bringing to the crease Marlon Samuels. Parvinder Awana rapped Samuels on the knuckles and Praveen Kumar kept the West Indian tied down for six balls, before Mascarenhas prized out two wickets in his opening over. Ganguly's leading edge flew to Marsh at point and Samuels was put out of his misery by a delivery that beat the bat and hit the stumps. When Harmeet Singh hit Angelo Mathews flush in front of the stumps with his third ball, after the Sri Lanka allrounder had greeted him with a six, Pune had slumped to 51 for 4.
It was left to Robin Uthappa and Mithun Manhas to try and stitch together a recovery stand, but Mascarenhas' retur prompted Uthappa to have a go first ball, only to find Bipul Sharma on the move at deep square leg. There were just three fours and one six after the tenth over, aptly displaying how tight Punjab kept it. After a couple poor outings Chawla bowled a tidy spell, picking up Pune's form batsman Steven Smith with a googly (99 for 6).
With singles and the odd boundary Manhas tried to give the total some respectability, but just when it seemed he might cut loose – he struck the first ball of Mascarenhas' fourth over for six – Manhas tried a cute shot and was bowled. Rahul Sharma exited three balls later, heaving to deep midwicket, and Ashok Dinda's run-out meant Pune had failed to bat out 20 overs.
Punjab's chase toward a small total began disastrously, with Dinda cleaning up Paul Valthaty first ball. Marsh and Adam Gilchrist then put on 50 in 47 balls, 36 of which came in nine deliveries through boundaries to indicate just how many dot balls there were in that partnership. That pacifying stand ended when Smith intercepted a fierce slash at point from Gilchrist who was looking for his fourth boundary.
Marsh was handed a life on 31 when Ryder failed to collect a throw at the nonstriker's end, and ten runs later when Dinda dropped a diving catch in the deep. Marsh responded by clipping Ashish Nehra for four to reach his half-century off 48 balls and then struck his first six, a screaming pull shot off Rahul Sharma. Together with Chawla, who came in at Mandeep Singh's dismissal and was dropped in the deep twice, Marsh finished the chase with 14 balls.
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