Payback time for Kolkata Knight Riders' favourite son Yusuf Pathan

KOLKATA: Here's one for the quiz master's notebook: Who was the only bowler to have delivered a dot ball to Yusuf Pathan on the night of May 24, 2014, when the Baroda Bomber tore Sunrisers Hyderabad to shreds at the Eden and propelled Kolkata Knight Riders past Chennai Super Kings into second place in IPL 7?
Karn Sharma won that consolation prize, as Yusuf missed an attempted whip one to the leg side.The young leggie, who had Yusuf dropped by Anirudh Srikkanth off the first ball he faced, ultimately picked up his wicket. But, by that time, the damage had been done.
It's been a season when T20 lovers have been treated to some mind-boggling power-hitting. Whirlwind half-centuries by David Miller (19-ball 51* against RR and 29-ball 66 vs RCB), Glenn Maxwell (38-ball 90 vs CSK and a couple of 43ball 95s) and Yuvraj Singh (29-ball 68* vs RCB) readily come to mind. But nothing can match Yusuf 's carnage (22-ball 72) when KKR were trying to chase 161 in just 15.2 overs.
It all seemed like child's play for Yusuf as he smashed 7 sixes, 5 fours, ran 6 singles and took 2 twos besides playing that solitary dot ball to race to his fifty in a record 15 balls and whip up an unbelievable strike rate of 327.27!
His knock can be crunched into three back-to-back overs - the 11th of the innings in which he took 21 off Parvez Rasool (2x6, 2x4), the 12th in which he scored 15 off Karn Sharma (2x6) and, most significantly, the 13th when he pounced on a dumbstruck Dale Steyn to plunder 26 (3x4, 2x6).
"I did not think much, we just had to score 80-odd runs from 36 balls to finish second... So we needed about 12-15 runs an over to take the game forward," was Yusuf 's uncomplicated explanation. "The only thing going on in my mind was to hit the ball that comes in the area," he added.
Sunrisers Hyderabad coach Tom Moody saluted Yusuf while ruing the missed chances. "You cannot give a player like Yusuf two chances. We have only ourselves to blame," said the Australian before adding: "He's a very good hitter. No ground is big enough to stop him."
For a man who hit a 37-ball hundred for Rajasthan Royals in 2010 and was bought by KKR for a whopping $2.1 million (Rs 10.5 crore) in the 2011 IPL players' auction, Yusuf has been the biggest underperformer over the last four seasons.
The fact that the Baroda right-hander had scored just one half-century in 52 innings in KKR colours before Saturday's blitzkrieg, tells its own story.
And yet, the KKR team management kept backing him to the hilt, retaining him for Rs 3.25 crore by playing the right-to-match card at the 2014 auction.