Sourav after the Eden match. Picture by Gautam Bose

Calcutta, May 8: Twenty20? Eden Gardens was swearing by Sweet16 tonight.

The script was perfect, starting with a thunderstorm and ending with Sourav Ganguly winning Man-of-the-Match as the Kolkata Knight Riders threw themselves a lifeline, pipping the Bangalore Royal Challengers by five runs.

In between, Sourav bowled rival Rahul Dravid in the middle of a strangulating three-over spell of one-for-seven, bringing the Eden to its feet.

“I know my limitations.… I’ve done a job for the team,” Sourav said.

But even before the captain’s heroics, Brad Hodge had probably provided the psychological turning point with a brilliant run-out of opener Arunkumar who had just smashed Umar Gul for three boundaries.

Fielding at backward point, Hodge stopped the ball on the slide with his left hand, transferred it to his right and shattered the stumps with a direct hit that immediately raised the drooping shoulders and seemed to put the missing fire into the entire fielding team.

It had been a big day on the Bengali’s calendar of icons, and singer Indrani Sen had begun the evening reflecting the stadium’s mood with Rabindranath Tagore’s Baro asha kore eshechhi go (I have come with high hopes).

Knight Riders owner Shah Rukh Khan lent his voice to the poet’s “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high”. For the next couple of hours the actor seemed to belie those words as he sat silent and tense in his seat, uninterested in celebrating even the sixes by David Hussey or the fall of Dravid’s wicket.

The Knight Riders’ start was as damp as the weather that truncated the match to 16 overs a side, and Sourav, too, would have been nervous after his scratchy 20 off 22 failed to rejuvenate the innings.

New recruits Aakash Chopra and Hodge both failed and the Knights were 20 for two. Hussey’s consecutive sixes off Anil Kumble partly lifted the gloom but at 88 for six with just four overs to go, a fifth straight defeat seemed probable.

Then came some quick blows from Murali Kartik and Wriddhiman Saha, but a total of 129 for seven still looked small.

But only till the Royal Challengers, the tournament’s “Test team”, came out to bat and started as if they had 30 overs to play.

Dravid’s dismissal, however, threatened to become a second turning point — in the Bangaloreans’ favour — when his replacement, Australian Cameron White, and South African Mark Boucher seemed game for the challenge of scoring 77 off 36 balls.

The raining sixes and fours whittled the target down to 39 off 18. When Ishant Sharma started running in, memories of his nightmare last over in the previous game would have surfaced in many minds.

It was Ishant’s day to show he could be a strangler at the death, too, and despite Boucher providing a few jitters in the 15th over, bowled by Kartik, the strapping Delhi fast bowler did not let Calcutta down.

With six points from seven games, the Knights are back at the fifth spot in the standings.

As the match approached the end, Shah Rukh climbed on his chair and egged the crowd on. After the awards ceremony, he broke into a victory lap with friend Arjun Rampal though most people had left by then.

But Eden and a fiasco seem inseparable. The 105-minute rain delay failed to be a spoiler but a goof by the scorers almost did. They mixed up the two Kumars in the visiting team, Praveen and Vinay, miscounted their overs and nearly hobbled Dravid’s bowling changes. It aptly reflected the confusion that marked the Royal Challengers’ approach today.