South Africa’s Marco Jansen and India’s T Natarajan took 3 wickets each and an unbeaten 47 from Abhishek Sharma powered Hyderabad’s 5th consecutive win in the Indian T20 Cricket League 2022 tournament, as the 2016 title winners shot out Bangalore for a record 6th lowest total of 68 in the Match No 26 on Saturday night.
Only two batsmen – Suyash Prabhudessai and Glenn Maxwell — were able to get into double digits as Hyderabad bowlers ran riot in the Bangalore ranks to hand them the ignominy of recording the 6th lowest total in the history of the tournament while suffering the 4th biggest defeat in terms of balls remaining (72).
The carnage began in the second over of the first innings when Bangalore lost their chunk of batting in the form of captain Faf du Plessis (5), former captain V Kohlii (0) and wicketkeeper-batsman Anuj Rawat (0) on the second, third and the final delivery from Marco Jansen.
The tall South African bowler Marco Jansen has indeed looked dangerous in the past showing his ability to move the ball both ways and troubling the batsmen early on. But on Sunday night, he was absolutely unbelievable, reducing three high-quality deliveries to get as many wickets inside one hour.
Faf du Plessis’ off-stump was knocked down by a delivery that surprised the batsmen with its length, forcing him to play but in a wrong line. V Kohlii got a perfect out-swinger which was full-pitched, forcing the batsman to play and the right-hander could not avoid edging it behind to the slips.
The first ball dismissal for V Kohlii was also his second such dismissal consecutively, throwing the batting maestro into further distress as far as his individual performance are concerned.
V Kohlii has gone without scoring a century in international format for more than three years now and one of the tournament's highest run-getters has been struggling on all fronts this year.
Glenn Maxwell and Suyash Prabhudessai tried to counter-attack but T Natarajan dismissed the Australian all-rounder, who was guilty of going aggressively and not carefully which the situation demanded. Glenn Maxwell hit two boundaries to make 12 from 11 balls whereas Suyash Prabhudessai cracked 1 boundary to make the highest score of Bangalore 15 runs from 20 balls.
While Marco Jansen accounted for the top three Bangalore batsmen, Natarajan got rid of Glenn Maxwell, Harshal Patel (4) and Wanindu Hasaranga (8).
Among the other wicket-takers were Jagadeesha Suchith, who returned with a quality spell of 3-0-12-2 where as Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Umran Malik took one wicket each.
For Hyderabad, it was vital to go as aggressive as possible with the bat in order to knock over the target in a quick manner, which would have helped them gain more Net Run Rate points.
Hyderabad all-rounder Abhishek Sharma top scored with 47 from 28 balls with the help of 8 boundaries and a six whereas Kane Williamson remained unbeaten on a 17-ball 16 with the help of 2 boundaries. The in-formeRahul Tripathi was at the other end batting on 7, when the winning runs were hit in the ninth over.
The massive victory by 9 wickets and 72 balls to spare propelled Hyderabad to the 2nd spot in the points table as they now have 10 points from 7 matches with 5 victories and 2 defeats which they suffered at the start of the tournament, and their NNR is 0.432.
On the other hand, Bangalore were placed 4th with a net run rate of -0.470 while they have 5 wins and 3 defeats from 8 matches played so far.
Hyderabad will look to continue with their winning momentum when they take on the dangerous and current table toppers Gujarat on Wednesday night, April 27 whereas Bangalore will look to bounce back against Rajasthan on April 26.
Devarchit Varma is a cricket writer and journalist with an experience of more than a decade, having worked at Hindustan Times (newspaper) and CricketCountry (website). Along with covering international and domestic cricket, he has also interviewed several current and former top players such as Rohit Sharma, Steve Smith, Dale Steyn, Michael Hussey, Jacques Kallis, Brendon McCullum, Shane Watson, Lasith Malinga and many more. He has also worked in other beats as a journalist in Bollywood (Reliance BigOye) and IT (SiliconIndia) industries.
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