IPL 2023Yuzvendra Chahal 4 for 17 highlights Rajasthan Royals' dominant performance over SunRisers Hyderabad

By Kingshuk KusariFinalists of the Indian Premier League 2022 season, Rajasthan Royals started off their campaign with a strong statement, defeating SunRisers Hyderabad at the Rajiv Gandhi Stadium in Hyderabad on April 2, Sunday.

In a statement win, Rajasthan dominated with both bat and ball and secured a win by 72 runs. Captain Sanju Samson, Jos Buttler and Yashasvi Jaiswal starred with the bat, while Trent Boult and Yuzvendra Chahal dominated with the ball for away side.

IPL 2023SRH vs RR – As It Happened

After Royals’ exuberant batting performance, Yuzvendra Chahal picked four wickets to leave SRH reeling in the encounter.

Tremendous Opening

Rajasthan Royals showed their full potential with the bat, scoring the sixth-highest runs in the powerplay overs in IPL history. Powered by strong starts from Yashasvi Jaiswal and Jos Buttler, Royals reached 85 runs in the first 6 overs of the game. Buttler, who looked like he was racing away to a century, lost his wicket against the run of play in the fifth ball of the final powerplay over.

First 200+ score in IPL 2023

Rajasthan had raced away to 100 runs in the 8th over of the game, and it felt like they would score at the excess of 220 runs. SRH coach Brian Lara spoke in the sidelines of the game and said that they would be happy to chase something little more than 200 runs.

SRH made a decent comeback in the final 10 overs of the game, conceding 81 runs. Helped by spells from Fazalhaq Farooqui (2/41) and T Natarajan (2/23), SRH brought back the game into their reach at the half time.

SRH’s Poor Show

Having chosen to bowl first in the hopes of making use of the due, SRH would have hoped that their batters return the favour. However, that turned to be far from the truth as both Abhishek Sharma and Rahul Tripathi walked back home in the first over of the match against the evergreen Trent Boult.

It can be argued that SRH did not have a full strength batting attack, that would include their captain Aiden Markram and possibly Heinrich Klaasen, who are busy with their national duties.

However, that could not have been an excuse for SRH batters looking clueless against both pace and spin, where they failed to negotiate Trent Boult in the powerplay and then Yuzvendra Chahal and Ravi Ashwin in the later overs of the game. Chahal’s 4 wickets for 17 runs made him the first Indian bowler to reach the milestone of 300 wickets.

Chahal cleaned up Mayank Agarwal, Harry Brook, Adil Rashid, and SRH captain Bhuvneshwar Kumar on Sunday.

Learnings

Rajasthan picked things up from where they left off last season. Under the captaincy of Sanju Samson, RR had a spirited campaign and reached the finals of the tournament. While it is too soon to predict if they will repeat it or not, but one can argue that they ticked most of the boxes in their opener against SRH. However, they might need to have a talk with Navdeep Saini, who bowled three no-balls on the day and gave away 34 runs from 2 overs.

The home team on the other hand would hope that they look like a completely different unit once their SA contingent comes back.