Royal Challengers Bangalore skipper Virat Kohli won the toss and elected to field first. Shikhar Dhawan and Alex opened the innings for Sunrisers Hyderabad and Moeen Ali came to bowl the first over of the innings and gave away 4 runs as kept the things tight for RCB.
Things wasn’t easy for the ‘Orange Army’ today. They were struggling to make it on the scoreboard. At he score of 5 Hales got out. It was just the beginning for RCB’s bowlers. Slower runrate, tight fielding and stunning bowling made it too difficult to SRH to score. Somehow after loosing Dhawan and Pandey, Captain Williamson and Shakib took it to the score of more than a hundred. But then at the last bowl of 16th over he lost his wicket and followed by Shakib as well. Newly came Pathan too lost his wicket and now the score was 134/6, 18.1 overs. And SRH lost it’s remaining four wickets very dramatically which summed up the team at the score of 146/10.
RCB was too happy to having a low target comparatively and Bowlers did a very good job. Southee and Siraj took 3 wickets each.
Now it was SRH’s turn to give it back. This team is known for defending such low scores and snatch a win. In the start RCB looked formed and calm. But then patel couldn’t read the ball by Shakib and got LBW. Vohra and Kohli tried to be back of the team and grab the win but then Vohra trapped by Sandeep. Team score of 74, Kohli caught by Yusuf and in the next over AB too bowled by Rashid Khan. Team was under pressure. Moeen Ali couldn’t do much in his debut match of IPL 2018.
Mandeep and Colin de Grandhomme were virtually the last hope for RCB and they needed to rescue their team from this situation. To snatch a victory from the mighty ‘orange army’ looked a Big task now.
But scoring runs was like is a catch-22.
RCB were at their wits’ end. In the last over RCB needed 12 runs of 6 balls. Bhuvi express got the ball and didn’t gave any chance to batsman to hit the ball to a boundary. The result was in the favor of SRH and they recorded an extremely heart winning win.
SRH won by 5 runs. It was a gift for Hyderabad people from their team at Hyderabad.
For viewers it was a ‘Paisa Vasool’ match.
Ankit Vaishnav
