Picture Credit: Twitter/IPL
The Indian Premier League never fails to amaze the cricketing fans. Year after year, day after day, it has served some high-quality cricketing contests for the fans and the one on Wednesday between the Royal Challengers Bangalore and the Rajasthan Royals was no different. Although Bangalore won the toss and opted to field, for the first half of the Rajasthan innings, it seemed like Virat Kohli had made the wrong call.
Even Lewis (58 from 37 balls) and Yashasvi Jaiswal (31 from 22) had helped Rajasthan off to a great start. At one stage, Rajasthan were 91/1 at 10 overs and even reached the 100-run mark in 11 overs. But the fall of the Lewis in the first ball of the 12th over turned out to be a massive turning point as the RR middle-order failed to get any kind of momentum whatsoever and even continued to lose wickets.
In the last 10 overs, Rajasthan could only muster 58 runs and lost 8 wickets. Players of the match Yuzendra Chahal (2/18), Shahbaz Ahmed (2/10) and Harshal Patel's triple wicket final over were the reasons behind Bangalore's comeback. From there on Bangalore were never going to mess this up especially with the vital 2 points at stake.
Glenn Maxwell's unbeaten half-century (50 from 40 balls), as well as KS Bharat's 44 from 35 in the end, propelled Bangalore to a comfortable 7-wicket win with 17 balls remaining. While the Rajasthan bowlers tried hard and their fielders too gave it their all, they just did not have enough runs on the board and could not take wickets in regular intervals to make a match out of the score they had managed.
Mustafizur Rahman (2/20) was the stand-out performance from the RR point of the view with the ball in hand, while Riyan Parag displayed a brilliant bit of fielding to run out Virat Kohli at the non-strikers' end with a direct hit.
The win has taken Bangalore to 14 points from 11 matches as they remain third in the points tally. However, things are set to get tougher for Rajasthan as they remain at eight points from 11 matches and are placed at the seventh position.
Following the result, there have been reactions pouring in on social media. RR fans were clearly not pleased with Chris Morris' performance in the match as he conceded 50 runs without picking a wicket before also disappointing with the bat.
Here are some of the things that netizens have to say about the match: