Chennai and Warriors both progress to semi-finals
It’s pretty unusual that you see both teams celebrating on the pitch following a richly important cricket match, but that was the case yesterday evening.
Both the Warriors and the Chennai Super Kings qualified for the Champions League T20 semi-finals in a match the Indian Premier League team won by 10 runs. The victory saw Chennai join the Warriors and the http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Victoria-c859 Bushrangers at the top of the table, but after all the calculations were worked out, the Australian side missed out on a semi-final spot due to an inferior run-rate.
The Warriors won the toss and chose to bowl first, but struggled to find any real rhythm as Chennai made 136-6. David Hussey continued his sparkling form of late, making an aggressive 50 to start the innings off at a frantic pace; he was joined by http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Murali-Vijay-c78035 who helped to put on 63 for the first wicket.
Off-spinner http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Johan-Botha-c67173 was the pick of the Warriors bowlers, claiming the key wicket of Hussey, who miss-timed a slower delivery and was bowled, and conceded only 27 runs in four overs.
Unfortunately for the batting side, no-one could really match the early fireworks of Hussey and seamer Rusty Theron bowled very efficiently at the death, only conceding 16 runs from his four overs to restrict his opponents to a par score, on an effectively good pitch.
http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Ravichandran-Ashwin-c84208.
The Warriors needed to score at least 109 runs to go ahead of Victoria in the table on run-rate and even that looked in danger at one point until Marc Boucher smashed two-sixes in the penultimate over to secure his side’s place in the last four, and they went onto finish on 126-8.
The Warriors will now face the Redbacks in the semi-finals at Centurion on Saturday while the Super Kings play the Royal Challengers Bangalore in Durban on Friday.
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