Blazing innings of Rishabh Pant led Delhi to a spectacular win. Rishabh along with Quinton de Kock produced a match-winning partnership and cruised Delhi Daredevils to a convincing eight-wicket win over Gujarat Lions at the Saurashtra Cricket Association Stadium in the ongoing season of IPL.
Delhi won the toss and opted to bowl first. Gujarat had a very poor start of their innings as they lost their top order batsmen within the first four overs of the match. Lions opening batsmen McCullum and Dwayne Smith both are an extremely successful combination but was unable to perform as McCullum was dismissed by Zaheer after he misjudged a delivery.
Nadeem struck two wickets in the following over and the early loss of three wickets worked as a major disadvantage for Lions. Nadeem first knocked Smith and later he sent back Aaron Finch.
Incoming batsman Aaron Finch lasted for five balls and after that, he played a poor shot and was dismissed by Nadeem. Gujarat was struggling to score runs but Gujarat skipper Suresh Raina and Karthik came to bat and set Gujarat back on track with a 51 runs partnership. Raina made 24 runs off 20 balls and Karthik smashed 53 runs off 43 balls. Gujarat was looking back in the game Raina tried to hit a big shot on a Mohammed Shami’s delivery and missed as Quinton de Kock whipped off the bails.
Ravindra Jadeja came to bat and looking through his previous poor records in this season of IPL he played an unexpected innings of unbeaten 36 runs. Jadeja and Karthik were building a good partnership but Shami brought the partnership to an end with a straight delivery and sent back Karthik. James Faulkner too failed to perform and lost his wicket to Morris with some extremely poor shot selection. Jadeja with the help of incoming batsman Kishan added 10 runs in the last over of the Gujarat innings and took the total of Gujarat close to the 150-run mark. Gujarat made a total of 149 runs with the loss of 7 wickets.
In reply, Delhi got off to a striking start given the entire credit to Rishabh Pant and Quinton de Kock. Pant and de Kock gave Delhi an extremely impressive partnership of 115 runs in the opening. Chasing the target of 149 runs was not at all tough for Delhi. Pant smashed 69 runs off 40 balls including 9 boundaries and 2 big sixes. de Kock scored 46 runs off 45 balls and he supported Pant well from the other end of the line.
The duo led Delhi to score 61 runs without any loss of wickets after the completion of the powerplay. Both the batsmen were playing positively until the 13th over but on the 3rd ball of 14th over Pant was dismissed by Jadeja. After the dismissal of Pant, de Kock was dismissed in the 15th over of the match by Shivil. Incoming batsmen Sanju Samson and J.P. Duminy was not under any pressure to score as Pant and de Kock already struck the successive runs for the team. Both the batsmen played sensibly to lead Delhi to the victory line. Samson scored unbeaten 19 runs off 13 balls and Duminy made unbeaten 13 runs off 7 balls . Delhi reached to the victory line with ease and defeated Gujarat by 8 wickets.
4 May, 2016
Avni S. Singh