Rohit Sharma’s 54-Ball 80 Helped MI Post A Mammoth 195 Runs:
The Mumbai Indians (MI) shrugged off their weak effort against CSK to win their second game of the Indian Premier League ( IPL). They defeated the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) who were not quite ready for this game at all. Rohit Sharma was the star of the day with a 54-ball 80, after which the MI bowlers, particularly Jasprit Bumrah, defended 195 easily to win a 49-run win.
Chasing 196, the KKR did not get the start they expected from Sunil Narine and Shubman Gill. The pair of James Pattinson and Trent Boult held them quite, and both of the batsmen succumbed to pressure and were back in the hut by the fifth with a score of only 25. Surprisingly, Dinesh Karthik was promoted to number three while Nitish Rana was walking in the fifth wicket crash.
But the two batsmen were unable to lift the ante and match the necessary run-rate. MI Skipper Rohit Sharma rotated his bowlers beautifully and took over from their fifth bowlers. Karthik played some lovely strokes, but KKR was still behind the eight balls. Rana, too, looked nice during his brief stay, but at one point, it seemed like they had left too much to do for Andre Russell again.
Karthik and Rana were shot in a fast succession, and when Russell came out to bat, KKR needed 119 runs out of 46 deliveries. To make matters worse, Eoin Morgan wasn’t in the centre of the ball at all, and the dot balls from him just raised the pressure. The only hope came from this duo for KKR, but Rohit had held three overs of his ass bowler Bumrah with seven overs to go.
And he didn’t disappoint this time, knocking off Russell, who literally never got a run-a-ball score of 11. Bumrah has proven what a champion bowler he is by sending back Eoin Morgan to officially close every contest in the 16th game. To everyone’s surprise, Pat Cummins had some fun in the middle and narrowed MI’s winning margin. In a single, he hit four sixes off Jasprit Bumrah to interrupt his exceptional figures.
But that didn’t affect the final outcome, as the KKR had only hit 146 runs for the loss of nine wickets to lose the game by 49 runs.
