Yesterday, Chennai Super Kings faced Warriors at St George's Park, Port Elizabeth. This was an very crucial match for both the teams in order to enter semi-finals of the Airtel Champions League 2010. Chennai Super Kings have to win this match to make them very comfortable at the first position. If CSK looses this match they will be walking out of the series. For Warriors the case is little different, even if they loose the match they still have chances of registering their berth in the semis. All they have to do is to loose the match in a close range so that their net run rate is just above the Victorian Bushrangers. For the Victorian Bushrangers luck has to play if they need to enter the semis. Either Chennai Super Kings should loose this match or Warriors should loose the match by a huge margin so that their net run rate falls below Bushrangers net run rate. The toss went in the favor of CSK side and they decided to bat first.
Michael Hussey and Murali Vijay came in to bat first from the CSK side and pretty decent start. They both put up a good partnership of 63 runs. Murali Vijay got out by getting bowled in Justin Kreusch's delivery. In this match Suresh Raina did not last long and he departed scoring just 6 runs. MS Dhoni came in to bat and played some knocks which added some good runs to the teams total. Michael Hussey scored his 50 runs from 39 deliveries that included 4 fours and a six. After the fall of Hussey, MS Dhoni took over and stayed till the end which helped the team to come out of some bad situation. Finally, CSK ended up scoring 136 runs in total with the loss of 6 wickets. Justin Kreusch took 3 important wickets with an economy rate of just 4.75 runs per over.
Warriors needed 137 runs to win from 120 deliveries. Davy Jacobs and Ashwell Prince opened the batting innings for the Warriors. They started off aggressively by playing some good knocks and soon Ashwell Prince got out but this did not affect much. The runs were coming in all the ways, till they lost Justin Kreusch. This was an important turning point for the CSK where the match started to turn towards them. CSK were looking very dominant and where back in the game. Warriors easily managed to get 109 runs which was the requirement for them to enter the semi-finals and they achieved it. But they failed to win the match against CSK. Warriors ended up scoring a total score of 126 runs with the loss of 8 wickets. Ravichandran Ashwin took 3 wickets with an economy rate of 6 runs per over. Man of the match was chosen as Michael Hussey for brilliant batting performance and fielding where he took 2 awesome catches.
After this superb match, now both the teams are eligible to play the semi-finals of the Airtel Champions League 2010. Luck did not play in the favor of Victorian Bushrangers and now they are out of the series.
