SHAR­JAH – Sunil Nar­ine and, per­haps, An­dre Rus­sell will come face to face with fel­low West In­di­an Dwayne Bra­vo in the fi­nal of the In­di­an Pre­mier League on Fri­day in Dubai.

Nar­ine took 0-27 from his four overs and was dis­missed for a first-ball duck, and the in­jured Rus­sell was again a non-starter for Kolkata Knight Rid­ers (KKR) when they beat Del­hi Cap­i­tals by three wick­ets in the sec­ond qual­i­fi­er on Wednes­day.

Venkatesh Iy­er, how­ev­er, struck a flu­ent half-cen­tu­ry and helped KKR over­come a late wob­ble to land the knock­out punch on the Cap­i­tals, last sea­son’s run­ners-up, and the chart-top­per af­ter the pre­lim­i­nary stage of this sea­son.

KKR will take on Chen­nai Su­per Kings in the ti­tle bout on Fri­day at the Dubai In­ter­na­tion­al Crick­et Sta­di­um.

Set 136 for vic­to­ry, KKR ap­peared to be cruis­ing to vic­to­ry cour­tesy 55 from and 46 from fel­low open­er Shub­man Gill.

Iy­er got a lucky break when South African fast bowler Kag­iso Raba­da failed to hold on­to a sharp re­turn chance in the fifth over and hit four fours and three six­es in his third 50 in this sea­son’s IPL.

Cap­i­tals, whose line-up in­clud­ed West In­dies left-hand­ed bats­man Shim­ron Het­my­er, con­tin­ued to put in a fight and scalped three wick­ets, con­ced­ing on­ly three runs, and KKR slumped from 123 for one to 126 for four at the end of the 18th over.

South African fast bowler An­rich Nort­je then re­moved KKR and Eng­land white-ball cap­tain Eoin Mor­gan in the penul­ti­mate over, as the Cap­i­tals pushed their op­po­nents to score sev­en in the fi­nal over.

Ravichan­dran Ash­win then scalped the wick­ets of mer­cu­r­ial left-hand­ed Bangladesh all-rounder Shak­ib Al Hasan and Nar­ine in­side the first four balls of the last over.

This left the equa­tion of six runs need­ed to get from the last two balls and Rahul Tri­pathi creamed a straight six off Ash­win to seal the win for KKR with a ball to spare.

Ear­li­er, Del­hi strug­gled for mo­men­tum af­ter be­ing put in to bat on a slow pitch, los­ing reg­u­lar wick­ets fol­low­ing a brisk open­ing stand from Shikhar Dhawan and Prithvi Shaw.

Dhawan led the way with 36 and Shreyas Iy­er added 30, but the KKR bowlers used the typ­i­cal­ly slow na­ture of the pitch to keep the scor­ing in check, as the Cap­i­tals laboured to a mod­est 135 for five.

But Del­hi lost their sec­ond match in a row in the play­offs to miss out on a fi­nals berth.

(CMC)