After nine seasons, Royal Challengers Bengaluru clinched a top-two finish in the IPL and it came in the most extraordinary scenes, as their stand-in captain Jitesh Sharma played arguably the franchise’s greatest innings yet.
Set a target of 228 after LSG captain Rishabh Pant signed off an otherwise forgettable campaign with 118* off 61 balls, RCB needed to chase that down to avoid playing the Eliminator match of the playoffs.
Spurred on by Jitesh’s outrageous unbeaten 85 from 33 balls, complete with eight fours and six sixes, RCB knocked off the runs with six wickets and eight balls to spare, thus achieving the third-highest run-chase in IPL history with 230/4.
The result means that RCB have finished second have earned a place in the Qualifier play-off, where they will meet Punjab Kings. The winner of this game will gain passage directly Tuesday’s final while the loser will face the winner of Friday’s Eliminator between Gujurat Titans and Mumbai Indians.
The chase had been set up by Virat Kohli’s 54 off 30 balls, but his dismissal in the 12th over, after New Zealand’s Will O’Rourke took out two batsmen in the eighth over, had left the asking tricky. But aided by Mayank Agarwal who contributed a cool 41 not out from 23 balls, Jitesh backed his natural aggressive intent and took the game away from LSG.
He started as he meant to finish, flicking a boundary for four, and was savage on pace and spin alike. O’Rouke’s quota cost 74 runs – two short of Jofra Archer’s unwanted record for the IPL’s most expensive bowling – with Jitesh hitting a couple of fours and two successive sixes off the pacer’s last over. Incredibly, this was Jitesh’s first IPL fifty, and he made it one for the ages.
Earlier, Mitchell Marsh (67 off 37 balls) and Pant combined for a 152-run partnership in 77 balls to help LSG to 277/3 in their 20 overs. Marsh, playing this season as a specialist batsman, ended a personally terrific campaign with a tally of 627 runs at 48.23 and a strike-rate of 163.70 while Pant, whose batting and captaincy have been criticised widely, smashed 11 fours and eight sixes in his terrific century.
