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IPL2025: Noor, Ravindra, Gaikwad get CSK off to winning start
Chennai Super King’s bowling acquisitions during the off-season paid immediate dividends as their four new bowlers took nine wickets between them to restrict Mumbai Indians to 155 for 9, a total that they ultimately chased down with ease but not without a hiccup against debutant left-arm wristspinner Vignesh Purthur, who is yet to represent his state side in senior cricket.
However, it was the other left-arm wristspinner, younger than Puthur but a veteran by comparison, who made the telling impact. Noor Ahmad registered his best IPL figures and the best figures for a CSK spinner against MI, 4 for 18, to capitalise on the inroads made b Khaleel Ahmed whose CSK debut was not too shabby either: wickets of the openers and analysis of 4-0-29-3.
CSK captain Ruturaj Gaikwad made the chase look like a walk in the park with 53 off 26, bringing the requirement down to a run a ball in the ninth over, but this is when they started losing wickets to Puthur, struggling to impart power into his slow wristspin. Three of them holed out in the deep, but Rachin Ravindra anchored the chase with 65 off 45 to see them home.
Khaleel is a dichotomous IPL bowler. He is worse than the average fast bowler during afternoon games, and better than the average fast bowler in night games. The only explanation for it is that there is a small window for movement with the new ball under lights, and he is a different beast when the ball moves. It showed in how he denied the openers a big hit with the little bit of movement that was available. The eventual dismissals looked soft – Rohit Sharma caught at forward square leg and Ryan Rickleton bowled off an inside edge – but they were the results of the pressure created by Khaleel himself.
To make it better for CSK, their returning homeboy R Ashwin took a wicket in his first over. There is not much mystery to the Ashwin who has returned to CSK after more than a decade, but his length was immaculate, making it a risk every time the batters wanted to attack him. He ended up with figures of 4-0-31-1, the wicket being that of Will Jacks inside the powerplay.
Down at 36 for 3 in 4.4 overs, MI needed something special from their two best batters, stand-in captain Suryakumar Yadav and Tilak Varma. The latter hit right back by taking two fours off Ashwin and then hitting two sixes off Ravindra Jadeja, against whom Suryakumar doesn’t enjoy a good match-up.
Noor then applied the handbrake with some elan. He was so difficult to pick even MS Dhoni was beaten by a mile when he turned one past Varma’s outside edge. That seed of doubt cast, he went back to what he does more often, turn the ball the other way at high speed. Suryakumar was beaten on the outside edge and stumped in a flash by Dhoni.
Debutant Robin Minz couldn’t get going and tried a desperate shot only to be caught at long-off. Tilak was beaten both in the air and off the pitch: caught on the crease, he had no time to adjust to the ball that turned back in and trapped him lbw. Noor came back at the death to bowl Naman Dhir around his legs.
Nathan Ellis took care of one of the former CSK players, Mitchell Santner, but the other, Deepak Chahar gave MI something to bowl at with a cameo of 28 off 15.
CSK made a surprise move of promoting Rahul Tripathi ahead of Gaikwad, but it didn’t last long as Chahar carried on from where he had left off with the bat, taking a wicket in his first over against CSK with a well-directed short ball.
Gaikwad, though, batted like a dream, taking down Trent Boult and both former colleagues, Chahar and Santner. S Raju, who is supposed to be a good death bowler, made an indifferent start with the new ball, and CSK ran away to 62 in the powerplay. The field spread, but Gaikwad kept going, hitting Jacks for a beautiful inside-out six against the turn, suggesting an easy pitch to bat on.
With just 82 needed off the last 13 overs, CSK would have wanted to register a big net-run-rate bonus, which is perhaps why they kept trying to hit Puthur’s slow left-arm wristspin for sixes. More than anything it was his slow pace and the slight slowness of then pitch that kept resulting in catches on the fence. Still, Gaikwad, Shivam Dube and Deepak Hooda is not a bad debut haul at all.
By now, it was almost like the home crowd was willing MI to take wickets so that they could get a glimpse of Dhoni with the bat. When Jacks bowled Sam Curran for 4 off 9, it drew a big cheer but the sight of Jadeja quelled the excitement.
The steepest the task got was 31 off the last four overs, but this is when MI gave CSK some pace to work with, and Jadeja immediately hit Boult for a four. Ravindra was the only batter to hit boundaries off Puthur: three sixes, all thanks to momentum generated by his use of feet to charge at the bowler. A run-out in the 19th over gave the Chepauk crowd what they wanted, they even got a six to seal the game, but off the bat of Ravindra as Dhoni stayed unbeaten on 0 off 2.
Brief scores:
Chennai Super Kings 158 for 6 in 19.1 overs (Rachin Ravindra 65*, Ruturaj Gaikwad 53, Ravindra Jadeja 17; Deepak Chahar 1-18, Will Jacks 1-32, Vignesh Puthur 3-32) beat Mumbai Indians 155 for 9 in 20 overs (Ryan Rickelton 13, Will Jacks 11, Suryakumar Yadav 29, Tilak Varma 31, Naman Dhir 17, Mitchell Santner 11, Deepak Chahar 28*; Noor Ahmad 4-18, Khaleel Ahmed 3-29, Nathan Ellis 1-28, Ravichandran Ashwin 1-31) by four wickets
[Cricinfo]
Rajat Patidar led defending champions Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) into the final with the quickest innings of 90 or more in the IPL, scoring a delightful unbeaten 93 off 33 to take his team to 254 for 5, the highest total in an IPL playoff, against the best attack of the tournament, Gujarat Titans (GT). Having finished in the top two, GT still have a chance to make the final at their home ground in Ahmedabad in Qualifier 2 as they await the winner of the Eliminator between Sunrisers Hyderabad and Rajasthan Royals. The last eight IPLs have been won by the side winning this fixture: Qualifier 1.
Asked to bat first in chase-friendly Dharamsala, RCB came out full of intent and skill despite missing the injured Phil Salt, but GT nearly snuck back in with a period of 22 balls, 18 runs and two wickets of set batters in a single Jason Holder over. In the time that Patidar scored 93 off 33, the other end, including extras, produced 68 off 37 legal deliveries.
Having never scored more than 233, GT needed something special, and only Jos Buttler came close to that with 29 off 11. The RCB fast bowlers ran riot and took out half the side within the powerplay.
RCB would have dearly loved to have Salt back, but his absence allowed them to play Jacob Duffy as the fourth overseas player. Venkatesh Iyer started the innings with two fours off the first two balls, moving around in the crease to try to mess with the lengths of the GT fast bowlers. It took Virat Kohli four balls to lay bat on Kagiso Rabada’s hard lengths, but Venkatesh ramped him for a six first ball even though he got into a tangle.
Even though Rabada came back immediately with the wicket of Venkatesh, the makeshift opener had done his job with 19 off seven. Immediately after the wicket, Kohli charged at Siraj and drove him over mid-off. Some classic batting – a flick off the hip, a late cut and a square cut – from Devdutt Padikkal consigned Rabada to 18 in his second over and brought up the team fifty in just four overs.
Rattled, GT had to move away from bowling Siraj and Rabada through the powerplay for the first time in eight matches.
Holder and Rashid Khan combined to bring GT back into the contest. Holder kept hitting the hard lengths, and Rashid bowled his first two overs for no boundary. In between, Holder managed to remove Kohli and Padikkal for 43 off 25 and 30 off 19. Not big innings but ones that understood the assignment.
Having gone funky with their selection – no Romario Shepherd in the batting-first XI so they could play an extra bowler if Shepherd was not needed – RCB promoted Krunal Pandya to likely maintain ideal points of entry for Tim David and Jitesh Sharma. While Krunal did his job with 43 off 28, it was the other batter that led to dropping jaws.
Patidar broke the spell off 22 quiet balls with a pulled six off a Holder ball that wasn’t quite short enough. After a boundary-free first over from Kulwant Khejroliya, playing his first game of T20 cricket since last April, Prasidh Krishna created two opportunities in the 14th over. The first one, a leading edge, fell between the converging wicketkeeper and deep third. The second one went straight to Rabada at deep square leg, but was dropped with Patidar on 26 off 20. At the end of the 14th over, RCB were an even 140 for 3, the last time you could say the match was even.
Starting with no-balls from Khejroliya in the 15th over, the flood gates opened for 114 runs in the last six overs. Two of his nine sixes were bona fide highlights reels for the year. The first an extra-cover drive off Rashid from the crease, and then a back-foot drive over cover off Rabada, who by now had the purple cap. That shot off Rabada left even Kohli awestruck.
The GT bowlers didn’t quite try a quick bouncer at him, but Patidar nicely steered a slow bouncer over short fine with a delayed hook. At one point, even a century seemed likely, but he didn’t quite get enough strike.
For the first time ever, both innings of an IPL match started with two fours as B Sai Sudharsan hit Duffy for fours, but the GT openers were not as successful as the RCB top order at upsetting the bowlers’ lengths. Both Shubman Gill and Sudharsan tried charging at Bhuvneshwar, but got only two runs from his first over.
The pressure was mounting, but the first wicket came in an unconventional manner, with Sudharsan losing his bat as he cut Duffy away for four. The bat ricocheted onto the leg stump before the ball could reach the fence. Bhuvneshwar then extended his dominance over Gill with a wobble-seam delivery that got his leg stump. Now Bhuvneshwar leads the head-to-head with six wickets in 79 balls for just 80 runs.
No option left, Buttler came out swinging, looked dangerous, but Josh Hazlewood got the better of him with a knuckle-ball legcutter. The rest was always going to be a formality but RCB carried it out in style. Rasikh Salam bowled a double-wicket maiden to get Nishant Sindhu and Jason Holder to leave GT five down within the powerplay. Duffy ended up with three wickets, Bhuvneshwar reclaimed the purple cap, and only some late damage control from Rahul Tewatiya prevented this from becoming the biggest defeat in an IPL playoff match.
Brief scores:
Royal Challengers Bengaluru 254 for 5 in 20 overs (Venkatesh Iyer 19, Virat Kohli 43, Devdutt Padikkal 30, Rajat Patidar 93*, Krunal Pandya 43, Jitesh Sharma 15*; Kagiso Rabada 2-54, Jason Holder 2-39, Prasidh Krishna 1-53) beat Gujarat Titans 162 in 19.3 overs (Sai Sudarshan 14, Jos Buttler 29, RahulTewatia 68; Jacob Duffy 3-39, Bhuvenshwar Kumar 2-28, Josh Hazelwood 1-39, Rasik Salam 2-24, Krunal Pandya 2-16) by 92 runs
[Cricinfo]
Defending champions SC Jaffna Kings have made three signings, headlined by Shakib, while Galle Gallants and Colombo Kaps have signed two players each.
The Paddy Marketing Board has approximately 115,000 metric tonnes of paddy stocks purchased from farmers, which are currently stored in the Board’s warehouses, and it has been planned to retain a sufficient buffer stock from these reserves and sell the remaining quantity in order to provide the necessary storage space and financial resources for the purchase of paddy from farmers during the upcoming Yala season.
Accordingly, the Cabinet of Ministers has approved the resolution furnished by the Minister of Agriculture, Livestock, Land and Irrigation to sell the aforementioned paddy stocks
following a formal tender procedure.
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