The Indian Premier League!: Match-13, PWI vs RR, Subrata Roy Sahara Stadium, Pune

MATCH-13
PWI vs RR

Venue- SUBRATA ROY SAHARA STADIUM, PUNE
Match Officials- M.Erasmus, K.Srinath, V.Kulkarni(Umpires), R.Madugalle(Refree)

Toss- RR won the toss and chose to bat first

Result- PWI won by 7 wickets and 8 balls to spare!

Man Of The Match- AARON FINCH

Match Report-

It was a match played between an unbeaten team RR and a team who hadn't won a match so far. Many people bet on RR. Pune crowd again turned up in numbers to support their team! PWI, after loosing the toss got a wicket of Kushal Parera oon the first ball of the match. That lit up the crowd. And they started making lots of noise. Dravid and Rahane settled in nicely and scored at a good rate, playing proper cricketing shots. RR lost Rahane in 11th over when the runs on the board were 81. After that they lost Binny and Dravid(scored 54 off 48) in quick succession. Ross Taylor took an unbelievable catch to dismiss Dravid. They were struggling at 93/4 in 14.2 overs. Thanks to some kind of heroics at the end by Yagnik, Hodge and Faulkner that ended RR's innings at respectable score of 145 runs. It was two-pace wicket, so RR fancied their chances against the struggling for runs, batting line-up of PWI.

PWI had couple of changes in their side, which worked for them in that match. They left out Samuels(injury), Manish Pandey and brought Yuvraj and Aaron Finch in the playing XI.Aaron Finch and Robin Utthappa gave PWI a flying start. Dravid took fabulous one handed catch to get the fiery Utthappa out. When Utthappa [32(16)] got out the scorecard read, 58/1 in just 4.5 overs. Ross Taylor just nudged the ball around and played supporting role. Finch was on fire in that match. He scored 64(53) balls till he was bowled by Faulkner. Yuvraj and Mathews played sensibly after that to see the team home. PWI won the match by 7 wickets.

My Views-

This win for PWI, will give them lot's of confidence. They were good in every department. Inclusion of Finch and Yuvi was a big positive and made the team lot stronger. They will also have to find a way for Steve Smith, he was brilliant in last year's IPL. On other hand RR didn't bat well in the middle overs. Their bowlers were all over the place except Faulkner who took 2 wickets.