Pollard shock for Guyana as Mmbai win
In the first of their two must-win games, http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Mumbai-c820 Indians beat Guyana by 31 runs in a Group B match of the Champions League T20 at Durban.
Mumbai's victory was set up thanks largely to a blazing knock of 72 runs off just 30 balls by Kieron Pollard as his nine sixes decimated any hopes the Guyanese team harboured of winning the match.
Both teams had lost their first two matches in this tournament and needed to win to keep a mathematical possibility of progressing ahead from this half of the points table.
Mumbai won the toss and chose to bat in order to put up a decent score and put pressure on the opposition. Skipper Sachin Tendulkar and his opening partner http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Shikhar-Dhawan-c90019 set the pace early on as the duo added fifty runs by the seventh over. Tendulkar played
an attacking knock, making 48 runs off 39 balls with six fours and Dhawan scored a chanceless 39 off 37 balls with three boundaries and a six. The first wicket, off Tendulkar, fell in the eleventh over and brought Pollard to the crease.
The tall Trinidadian took a couple of deliveries to feel his way through but soon started hitting everything out of the Kingsmead Oval. But before that the batting side lost two wickets in five balls: Dhawan and Saurabh Tiwary out for a duck.
Pollard though brought them back into the match with some lusty blows. The final acceleration came from the sixteenth over onwards, as Mumbai plundered a massive 85 runs in the last five overs. He put up a 53-runs stand with http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Ambati-Rayudu-c1007 who contributed
only four runs to the partnership as Mumbai reached 184 for 4 in their quota of twenty overs.
Guyana started their innings on the back foot and their openers didn’t contribute much. But skipper Ramnaresh Sarwan and http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Narsingh-Deonarine-c78681 put up 46 runs for the third wicket and kept their side in with an improbably fighting chance. Sarwan topscored with
46 off 38 balls but the run-rate was too high in the latter stages of the innings to have any chance of victory. During the innings however, the rivalry between Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago came to the fore as Sarwan had a couple of run-ins with Dwayne Bravo.
Even Pollard termed his brutal innings as revenge for Trinidad’s loss in the domestic T20 competition to Guyana.
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