Trin­ba­go Knight Rid­ers (TKR) con­tin­ued their mag­nif­i­cent run at the 2020 Hero Caribbean Pre­mier League (CPL) with a re­sound­ing nine-wick­et vic­to­ry over the St Kitts/Nevis Pa­tri­ots in their fi­nal pre­lim­i­nary round match at the Bri­an Lara Crick­et Acad­e­my in Tarou­ba, San Fer­nan­do on Sun­day, mak­ing it 10 straight wins.

SCORES: St Kitts/Nevis Pa­tri­ots 77 all out (18.2) vs TKR 78/1 (11.3) - TKR won by nine wick­ets.

A bril­liant per­for­mance by the Knight Rid­ers' bowlers on a track that held no ter­rors saw them rout the Pa­tri­ots for just 77 runs with 10 balls to spare in the in­nings.

Open­er Tion Web­ster than banged an un­beat­en 41 to rush the home fran­chise to vic­to­ry at 78/1 off 11.3 overs. Web­ster and Amir Jan­goo get­ting his sec­ond game bat­ted well to add 54 runs from eight overs at the start of the chase. When Jan­goo fell for a 24-ball 19, the chase was near­ly for­malised.

Web­ster end­ed up fac­ing 33 balls, strik­ing a six and five fours. When vic­to­ry came, he had as a com­pa­ny the New Zealan­der Tim Seifert who closed on 16 not out off 12 balls with a six.

Ear­li­er, the Pa­tri­ots won the toss and were served a di­et of slow bowl­ing by TKR skip­per Kieron Pol­lard. With the big hit­ters, Evin Lewis and Chris Lynn at the top, Pol­lard opened with Akeal Ho­sein and Sikan­dar Raza.

Not giv­ing the open­ers pace to work with, they grew frus­trat­ed and gave away their hand. Af­ter these two spin­ners were done, Pol­lard un­leashed his leg-spin­ning twins in Fawad Ahmed and the 48-year-old Praveen Tambe. They pro­ceed to wreck the mid­dle and low­er or­der, with Fawad end­ing with 4/21. Tambe was al­so bril­liant giv­ing away on­ly nine runs from his al­lot­ted four overs and tak­ing one wick­et.

Pace was in­tro­duced in the 13th over through the fit-again Ali Khan and he pro­duced a wick­et im­me­di­ate­ly. So too did his fel­low pac­er An­der­son Phillip who took the fi­nal wick­et. An ef­fi­cient bowl­ing per­for­mance even with­out the likes of Sunil Nar­ine, Dwayne Bra­vo, and Khary Pierre who were rest­ed.

The TKR will bat­tle the Ja­maica Tallawahs next in their se­mi-fi­nal clash on Tues­day at the BLCA from 10 am, while the Guyana Ama­zon War­riors play the St Lu­cia Zouks at 5.30 pm. The win­ners will meet in the fi­nal on Thurs­day at the same venue from 10 am.

Man of the match Ahmed speak­ing af­ter the game said: "Mixed form for me - but in this game, I've come well and it's a re­al­ly good sign for me. Tak­ing wick­ets gives you a lot of con­fi­dence, es­pe­cial­ly go­ing in­to the se­mi-fi­nals. To win 10 out of 10, it's an amaz­ing team per­for­mance. You can tell we have a lot of dif­fer­ent match-win­ners in the team. That's the se­cret to our per­for­mance, a lot of play­ers are per­form­ing well, three-four bowlers, four-five bats­men. We are miss­ing two of our play­ers (Col­in) Munro and Sunil (Nar­ine), hope­ful­ly, Sunil will be fit for the se­mi-fi­nal."

SCORES:

St Kitts/Nevis Pa­tri­ots 77 all out (18.2) (De­nesh Ramdin 19, Rayad Em­rit 15, Fawad Ahmed 4/21, Akeal Ho­sein 2/26, Praveen Tambe 1/9) vs TKR 78/1 (11.3) (Tion Web­ster 41 no, Amir Jan­goo 19, Tim Seifert 16 no) - TKR won by 9 wk­ts.

Man of the match: Fawad Ahmed