Vishakapatnam, Mar 25: Impact sub Ashutosh Sharma played the most defining knock of his IPL career to guide Delhi Capitals to a thrilling one wicket victory over Lucknow Super Giants here on Monday. Ashutosh smashed 66 not out off 31 balls and finished it with a huge six off Shahbaz Ahmed as DC chased down a target of 210 with three balls to spare.The right-hander hit five fours and five sixes in all.
DC were 7 for 3 at one stage and then 113 for 6 but Ashutosh and unheralded Vipraj Nigam (39 off 15 balls) added 55 runs in quick time before the Railways man finished it off in style despite wickets falling at the other end.
LSG were 20 short during batting and paid the price for not having any of their frontline pacers on the park due to injury. It didn’t help that Ravi Bishnoi was hit for 53 runs.
Earlier, Delhi Capitals bowlers did well at the back-end to restrict Lucknow Super Giants to 209 for 8 on a batting paradise, despite attractive fifties from Mitchell Marsh (72) and Nicholas Pooran (75).
Kuldeep Yadav was easily the most impactful bowler with figures of 2 for 20 while Mitchell Starc used his variations to end with best figures 3 for 42 in four overs.
Ashutosh Sharma, POTM: Took the lessons from last year. Missed out on finishing the game on a couple of occasions in the previous season. The whole year I focussed and visualised about it. Had the belief that if I play till the last over, anything can happen. Well played to Vipraj. I asked him to keep hitting. He was very calm under pressure. Want to dedicate this award to my mentor Shikhar paaji.
Axar Patel, DC captain: Get used to it now. It’s going to be like this only under my captaincy, Things will be up and down a little. Now that we have won, people won’t complain about why I gave that over to Stubbs. Don’t remember the last time I saw something like this. The way they played in the first six overs, we felt we gave a few too many early on. We dropped some catches as well. It looked like they could score 240, but we pulled things back. We know how much potential he has (Vipraj Nigam).
Rishabh Pant: I think our top-order batters played really well and I think it was a pretty good score on this wicket. As a team we are looking to take positives from every match and as a team we are looking to learn from it (every match.) The more basics we do right, the more it is going to be better for us in the future. We got early wickets, but we knew it was a good wicket to bat on. We had to keep doing the basics right more often than not. I think they had a couple of good partnerships. One with Stubbs, with Ashutosh and one with one other guy (Vipraj Nigam.) I think he (Nigam) did a pretty good job and took the game away from us. There was enough for the bowlers, but I think we could have done the basics right. We felt the pressure, we are still settling in, but a lots of positives to take from this match. Definitely luck plays a part in this game and if it could have missed his (Mohit Sharma’s) pads, it was a chance for stumping. But these things happen in the game of cricket, you can’t focus on these things, but rather you need to play better cricket.