Lucknow Super Giants won by 10 runs over Rajasthan Royals in the 26th match of the IPL 2023 at Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur. Rajasthan Royals won the toss and opted to bowl. Put into bat, Lucknow Super Giants managed 154 runs in 20 overs. Kyle Mayers scored a steady fifty whereas Marcus Stoinis played a quick cameo towards the end as well.
While chasing, Rajasthan Royals got off to a flying start with Yashasvi Jaiswal and Jos Buttler adding 87 runs. The game looked to be in their hand but bowlers, especially Avesh Khan and Marcus Stoinis did their best and restricted them to 144, winning the game at the end.
Here is what the captains and the player of the match said after the game:
Marcus Stoinis, Player of the Match said as quoted by Cricbuzz: Nice to get involved with the ball, had no real plans to get Jos out that way but I just used some cricketing smarts and bowled it short into the wicket. We identified this is a difficult wicket, so we realised we don’t need a 50 off 20 balls on this surface. (On whether he will bowl more) You will have to ask the skipper that question, but fitness wise I’m ready to go. All good.
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KL Rahul said as quoted by Cricbuzz: I got hit by one of the throws from my teammates, so clearly doing something wrong as captain. In the 10 over mark, the message me and Kyle sent out was 160 would be a good total on this track, they have some good bowlers as well who exploited the conditions. We fell 10 short but made up with the ball. And there was no dew so made it fair for both teams. We game in here yesterday and saw 180 would be a par score, but the first over from Boult, me and Kyle had a chat and realised this isn’t a 180 wicket. The ball was keeping a bit low, so we gave ourselves time in the powerplay. Maybe if we played a bit better, we might have got 170 as well. I think that run-out from the impact player (Mishra), and two wickets falling back to back gives the oppostion (his own team) a chance. We know with Rajasthan their strength is their top four, so we needed to have our plans in place to get them out.
Kyle Mayers said as quoted by Cricbuzz: Any victory away from home is good, we always stress on winning away from home. I played some national cricket and came into this tournament. It was a difficult pitch for strokeplay. I was trying to hit more boundaries than sixes, not an easy pitch to come in and start hitting. It was critical to assess and understand that I need some balls to get used to this pitch. I think it (pitch) was just playing low. In terms of bounce it was up and down. Variable bounce was the hardest to handle today.
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Sanju Samson said as quoted by Cricbuzz: Not that great (feeling) after a loss, but it’s okay. We’d have loved to win the first game at Jaipur. We’ll definitely take lessons and move on. With the batting line-up we have, it was a very chaseable score. But they bowled really well, used the conditions really well. (Conditions) Personally I was expecting something like this, bit of slow and low kind of wicket is what I expected and we got that. You need to play some smart cricket and we did that till the ninth over. Right after Jaiswal got out, it was a matter of getting that one big partnership. They bowled really well, whenever we tried to go hard at them, I think we lost wickets. 5 overs 50 in this kind of wicket is a bit tough with the way they were bowling. Even if you win or lose a game, you take lessons out of it, that’s the beauty of this game. We’ll be taking lot of lessons out of it. We did a reasonably good job to restrict them to 150. There are lots of lessons in the bowling side as well and in the batting also. We expect much better performance and we all know the standard of cricket we’ve been playing. We have to move forward and play some better cricket.
