Sri Lanka’s Matheesha Pathirana returned-career best T20 figures as the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) cruised to a convincing six-wicket victory over Mumbai Indians (MI) in the 49th match of the Indian Premier League (IPL) played at the M. A. Chidambaram Stadium in Chepauk, Chennai on Saturday.
The in-form and skilful Pathirana led the way with an excellent spell of three wickets for 15 as a disciplined, accurate and impactful bowling effort from the CSK bowling unit restricted MI to 139 for eight after they were invited to bat first. The home side then raced to their target with more than two overs to spare with Raturaj Gaikwad (30), Devon Conway (44), Ajinkya Rahane (21) and Shivam Dube (26) leading the run chase as the home side returned to winning ways after two successive defeats.
Pathirana playing in his seventh match of the current IPL season finished with brilliant figures of 4-0-15-3 and didn’t concede a single boundary in the spell as he went on to pocket the Player-of-the-Match Award and the Game Changer Award.
The 20-year-old fast bowler has now made it a habit to bowl the last over and he lived up to that reputation by conceding just the five runs and claiming two vital wickets during an outstanding spell of bowling. Pathirana started the 20th over with a full-length delivery angling across
to finish on off stump and Arshad Khan opened the bat faced to send it flat to the man in the deep with Raturaj Gaikwad holding on to the catch after a slight juggle.
Pathirana touched the 150kh-mark in his next delivery as Jofra Archer uncomfortably played a defensive forward push for a couple of runs before conceding a single in the third ball of the over.
Pathirana bowled a beautiful slow ball in his fourth delivery and Tristan Stubbs went slashing at this full ball with a flat bat and Ravindra Jadeja took a well-judged catch running to his right at cover-point.
Earlier, Pathirana removed the top scorer of the MI innings Nihal Wadhera with a yorker of the highest quality bowled at 146kph as the batsman moved across and looked to flick on the legside, but failed to get bat on ball and the stumps were rattled.
Chief scores
Mumbai Indians: 139/8 in 20 overs (Nehal Wadhera 64, Suryakumar Yadav 26, Tristan Stubbs 20, Deepak Chahar 2/18, Tushar Deshpande 2/26, Matheesha Pathirana 3/15)
Chennai Super Kings: 140/4 in 17.4 overs (Raturaj Gaikwad 30, Devon Conway 44, Ajinkya Rahane 21, Shivam Dube 26 n.o, Piyush Chawla 2/25). C.D
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