In between a couple brief but stunning teenaged debuts this past weekend in the IPL, the two senior figures of Indian cricket underlined their value in the modern T20 game with match-winning innings for their respective franchises.
A day after Vaibhav Suryavanshi, aged 14, struck his first ball faced in the IPL for six, Virat Kohli steered Royal Challengers Bengaluru to a seven-wicket win over Punjab Super Kings with an unbeaten 73 off 54 deliveries.
Less than 30 minutes later, the cricket world got a glimpse of another outrageous teenage Indian talent in 17-year-old Ayush Mhatre who on his debut for Chennai Super Kings raced to 32 off 15 balls. But it was the veteran Rohit Sharma who walked away with the plaudits as his Mumbai Indians hammered CSK by nine wickets, with the opener not out on 76 off 45.
Kohli’s innings came in a chase of 158, following good work from RCB’s spinners Krunal Pandya and Suyash Sharma who claimed 4/51 in eight overs combined. PBKS had raced to 62/1 in the Powerplay but a slew of wickets saw their innings lose steam, before a series of pin-point Yorkers at the death limited the big-hitting pair of Shashank Singh and Marco Jansen to 28 runs in the last four overs.
Despite the loss of Phil Salt in the first over, RCB blazed away in their chase via a 103-run partnership between Devdutt Padikkal (61 off 35) and Kohli who went past David Warner to score his record 67th IPL half-century. Kohli ran hard and assessed the PBKS bowlers well and was happy to play second fiddle to the more aggressive Padikkal. RCB won with seven deliveries to spare, the result put them level with PBKS on ten points.
In the second game of Sunday’s double-header, the local boy Mhatre, in his first IPL appearance, smashed 17 runs off his first four balls. His innings, however, was one more in line of aborted attempts from CSK’s batting which put up 176/5 overs in Mumbai.
But that was made to look grossly insufficient thanks to Rohit and Surkayumar Yadav who chased the target down in the 16th over. Rohit, who had struggled in each of MI’s previous matches, struck four sixes and six sixes in his match-winning effort, while Suryakumar finished 68* off 30 balls.
While CSK remain at last on the points table, MI have now jumped to sixth spot.
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