The Kolkata Knight Riders have missed the plot entirely this season. After having dominated the early days of the season, they have now lost six games on a trot. Their most recent defeat came against the Rajasthan Royals in a home game at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata.

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After having posted 175 runs on the board, KKR were pretty much in the hunt to defend the total. But as the story has been for the team, they couldn’t capitalise big moments of the game and eventually suffered a three-wicket loss.

The team needs to win every game coming their way, and that too by a decent margin if they are eyeing for a spot in the playoffs this season. With this, let’s look at some important factors which took the game away from the hosts:

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1. KKR lost wickets at regular intervals

The story of the top-order failures continued for KKR even against Rajasthan Royals’ bowling attack. Chris Lynn joined a new opening partner Shubman Gill, and Varun Aaron castled the former in the first over. Nitish Rana also couldn’t do much even as Gill also walked back to the dressing room.

Dinesh Karthik took the responsibility and came out to bat at number four. He struggled early on and was batting at three off 12 balls.

They missed the Russell storm as he scored only 14 runs and was dropped twice before getting caught the third time. His failure made the difference in the end as RR overhauled the target superbly in the end.

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In total, Rajasthan Royals managed to scalp six wickets which came in first, fifth, ninth, twelfth, seventeenth, and eighteenth over of the innings. This never really allowed KKR to push for a better score than the one they posted.

2. Sunil Narine dropped Riyan Parag in the eighth over

Parag wouldn’t have been able to play his special innings if Sunil Narine had latched on to a return catch from the young sensation batsman in the eight over. Parag had just come to the crease, and in his third ball, he chipped a delivery from Narine back to him, but he put down a simple chance as he started to celebrate even before catching the ball.

The Kolkata Knight Riders camp will surely look at that moment which changed their fortunes. Parag was batting on zero when the catch was put down.

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Post this, Parag played maturely and anchored Rajasthan Royals’ innings. At one stage, the score for the visitors was 98 for the loss of 5 wickets in the 13th over, but Parag strung two important partnerships with Shreyas Gopal and Jofra Archer to help his team cross the winning line.

Though he missed a well-deserved half-century, his 47 runs along with Jofra’s quick-fire cameo of 27 runs did the trick for Royals to register their fourth win of the season.