Rajasthan Royals registered a comfortable 7-wicket win over Sunrisers Hyderabad on Saturday at Jaipur to keep their playoff hopes alive. Jaydev Unadkat(2/26) starred with the ball before Liam Livingstone(44) and Sanju Samson (48*) sealed the victory for Royals. Apart from them, there was another RR cricketer – Ashton Turner - who was in the news despite contributing only 3* runs to the team’s total. This was because Turner actually got off the mark for the first time in six T20 innings.
Before the match against SRH, Turner had a notorious record of being only the first cricketer to register five consecutive ducks in T20s. So when the Australian batsman took a single off Bhuvneshwar Kumar to score his first runs in IPL, the RR dressing room was in splits. Kumar too saw the lighter side of it before walking back to his mark.
Here are some of the twitter reactions to Ashton Turner’s first runs in six T20 innings.
Turner’s torrid time in T20s started back in February when he got out for a duck in a BBL match against Perth Scorchers. He was then dismissed for another duck in his maiden T20I in India a couple of weeks later. His disastrous run continued even in the IPL when he registered a hat-trick of ducks for Royals. In between, however, Turner had made his mark by leading Australia to victory in an ODI against India at Mohali. He had scored an unbeaten 84 off 43 balls as Australia pulled off their highest ever run-chase – 359.
{{/usCountry}}Turner’s torrid time in T20s started back in February when he got out for a duck in a BBL match against Perth Scorchers. He was then dismissed for another duck in his maiden T20I in India a couple of weeks later. His disastrous run continued even in the IPL when he registered a hat-trick of ducks for Royals. In between, however, Turner had made his mark by leading Australia to victory in an ODI against India at Mohali. He had scored an unbeaten 84 off 43 balls as Australia pulled off their highest ever run-chase – 359.
{{/usCountry}}Coming back to the RR vs SRH match, Rajasthan first restricted Sunrisers to 160 for eight after opting to bowl first and then chased down the target in 19.1 overs.
By virtue of this win, Rajasthan moved to the sixth position in the IPL standings with 10 points from 12 games. But to stay in contention for a play-off berth, Rajasthan first must win their remaining two away games against Royal Challengers Bangalore on April 30 and Delhi Capitals on May 4 and then hope for favourable results from other matches.