 Vineet Ramakrishnan
Bangalore: 21 runs were needed off the last 6 balls, and Sourabh Tiwary hit a DLF maximum over long on in the last ball of the match sealing the deal in favour Royal Challengers Bangalore in front of a thunderous Chinnaswamy crowd against Pune Warriors India here on Tuesday.
RCB vs Pune: As it happened
Chasing a target of 182, Royal Challengers Bangalore (186/4), assisted by a Gayle blitzkrieg of 81 runs (48 balls) and De Villiers’ 32 (14 balls) pyrotechnics, came back from the dead to snatch an unlikely victory against the aggressor Pune Warriors to register their second win of the league this season.
With a target set on 182 and putting RCB on the mat with 63/2 in 10 overs, Pune would feel like being robbed off something that they deserved. The capriciousness and the unpredictability of T20 game could not have been epitomized in any better way than on Tuesday as Rajasthan earlier scripted a spectacular comeback against Deccan, only to be followed by another nerve wracking fixture at Bangalore.
Pune had done everything right, well almost as they missed the trick to contain Chris Gayle who shadowed his real self throughout his innings only to unleash the fury on Rahul Sharma in the 13th over .
That spectacular over read something like this 1,6,6,6,6,6. If that was the ever clichéd turing point of the game, well, an anti climatic cliché was to follow. Ashok Dinda has been a man possessed this IPL season and ignoring the side strain the Bengal speedstar bowled an excellent penultimate over, conceding just 7 runs, thus handing RCB with an improbable target of scoring 21 runs off 6 balls. But alas, the ant climax was blown away by AB De Villiers ingenuity and calm nerves and Sourabh Tiwary one hoick over long on.
Just for stats, Robin Uthappa (70 off 45 balls) had set the perfect platform for Pune to score a big total but the Pune batsmen failed to provide the required thrust ending up with still steep target of 182. Bhuvanesh Kumar’s spell of 4 overs 27 runs with an economy of 6.75 had put RCB behind the nine ball, yet the ‘Challengers’ rose to the occasions an scrapped past the ‘Warriors’ this one time.
First Published: Tuesday, April 17, 2012, 19:17
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