A New Home, an Old Class Reasserted — Powell and Munro Christen Pomona as LAKR End the Crisis Against du Plessis's Super Kings

Every ground has a first night, and it does not get to choose which team's story it tells. Knight Riders Field at Fairplex in Pomona — $21 million of concrete and ambition, a future Olympic venue still finding its shape — opened its doors to competitive cricket carrying the weight of a home side in crisis. The Los Angeles Knight Riders arrived at their own new fortress having lost the plot in the space of a week: a ten-wickets-for-fifty collapse against MI New York, a limp chase against Seattle, two defeats that turned a bright start to MLC 2026 into a question about character. A brand-new ground is supposed to be a celebration. For this team, on this night, it needed to be a rescue.

It became one. Chasing 174 against a Texas Super Kings side that has been the league's most complete outfit, the Knight Riders did the one thing they had failed to do all week — they batted with calm. Rovman Powell and Colin Munro took the game away from du Plessis's men in an unbroken fourth-wicket stand of 101, and by the finish LAKR were home by seven wickets with the destination never seriously in doubt. Pomona's first competitive match will be remembered as the night the home team stopped falling and started standing.

The chase turned on the arrival of Rovman Powell, and on the refusal of Colin Munro to be dislodged from the other end. Munro had done the unglamorous work first — 55 from 42 balls, the innings of a man determined to bat through the overs that had swallowed his team whole in the previous matches. This was not the reckless intent that produced 95 all out against MI New York; it was controlled aggression, the left-hander picking his moments and, crucially, staying in. If the Knight Riders' crisis was fundamentally one of composure rather than talent, Munro's fifty was the first evidence that the composure had returned.

And then Powell turned control into a statement. His 73 not out came from 27 balls — a strike rate north of 270, the kind of violence that does not merely win a chase but ends it as a contest. Where the middle order had panicked all week, Powell simply cleared the ropes: a burst of hitting that took the equation from awkward to academic and left Texas' bowlers without an answer. The unbroken 101 he shared with Munro is now the highest fourth-wicket partnership in the franchise's T20 history, and it was assembled at exactly the moment the season demanded it. A team that could not bat twenty overs five days earlier reached its target with three wickets down and time in the bank.

Texas Super Kings will feel that 173 for 5 was a few runs light on a small, true drop-in surface — and they will feel it most because the night's outstanding first-innings performer was one of their own local players rather than their galaxy of internationals. Saiteja Mukkamalla top-scored with 80 from 55 balls, a superb, tempo-setting innings that gave the Super Kings a platform their captain du Plessis would have taken at the toss. But the batting depth that has defined TSK's campaign did not, on this occasion, convert the platform into the 190-plus that might have tested LAKR's nerve. 173 was competitive; against a set Powell it was not enough.

There is no shame in the defeat — TSK remain among the league's strongest sides, and one loss on an opponent's opening night at a new home does little to alter that. But Stephen Fleming's men, so often the team that builds a total brick by brick and defends it to the last over, found themselves on the wrong end of a batting masterclass they could not disrupt. When a chasing side loses only three wickets and gets a 27-ball 73 from its most destructive player, there is rarely a bowling plan that survives it.

The Pomona drop-in surface, an unknown quantity before the first ball, played as a fair and honest T20 pitch — true bounce, decent pace onto the bat, and boundaries reachable for the powerful hitter under the dry Californian evening air. Mukkamalla's 80 and Powell's 73 were both innings that trusted the surface, and the absence of the extravagant, unpredictable behaviour that new drop-in pitches can sometimes produce meant the match was decided by execution rather than by the ground playing tricks. The San Gabriel Valley breeze did not, in the end, become the third team. On its debut, Knight Riders Field proved a ground on which good cricket is rewarded — and the better batting side won.

Rovman Powell was named Player of the Match, and it is hard to argue. His 73 not out from 27 balls was the innings that turned a nervy chase into a rout — the shot-making of a player who treats a run-chase not as a problem to be nursed but as a target to be obliterated. On a night when his franchise most needed someone to reassert its identity, Powell provided the answer in the most emphatic terms available to a batter: he took the game, and the new ground, and made both his own. That he did it alongside a composed Munro, in a record stand, only underlines how completely the Knight Riders' batting reversed the failings of the previous week.

Our pre-match preview leaned towards Texas Super Kings — on form, on depth, on consistency, the head said TSK — but we flagged, in the same breath, that 'cricket at a new ground is not cricket anywhere else,' that the energy of a venue's first competitive match has decided more T20 matches than the data models admit, and that if the Knight Riders could simply 'survive the powerplay without another collapse,' they might find a new home was exactly what the season needed. That is precisely what happened. Where we can hold our hands up: we built the Knight Riders' hopes around Narine's spell and Russell's power, and the match was instead won by Rovman Powell and Colin Munro — the two batters our preview under-weighted. And we did not see Saiteja Mukkamalla's 80 coming for Texas. The story arc we called; the names on it we got wrong.

For the Knight Riders, this is more than two points — it is a reset. A team that had forgotten how to bat through twenty overs suddenly remembered, and it did so at home, in front of a crowd that had waited months for this ground to open. Whether the confidence holds is the question the next fixture will answer, but a seven-wicket win over a table-topping side is the sort of result that turns a season's momentum. For Texas, a rare off-night to file away and move on from with their standing intact. And for Pomona, a debut it will not forget: the night a franchise in freefall found its feet on the ground it built.