Sultans’ third win, Qalandar’s loss: ‘It seems the catch has not been kept’

In the ninth season of Pakistan Super League, Multan Sultans’ win and defending champion Lahore Qalandars’ loss continues.

In the second match of the day to be played in Multan on Wednesday, Multan Sultans once again put up a good performance and defeated Shaheen Afridi’s Lahore Qalandars by five wickets.

This is Multan Sultans third consecutive victory in PSL 9 and the credit of this victory also goes to the head of Sultans captain Mohammad Rizwan.

Multan Sultans chased down Lahore Qalandars’ target of 167 runs with one over, thanks to the brilliant partnership of Muhammad Rizwan and David Valley and finally the aggressive batting of Iftikhar Ahmed.

But this win could have turned into a loss for Multan Sultans if Lahore Qalandars captain Shaheen Afridi had not dropped the catch of Mohammad Rizwan at the crucial moment of the match. This was the occasion when even the commentators had to say, ‘Looks like there are no catches in the tournament this time.’

Commentators say this because only this time in the PSL catches are being dropped as if the catch roll has actually been done away with.

Only Khushdil Shah has dropped four catches in two matches and Shaheen Afridi himself said after this match that if I had not dropped Rizwan’s catch, the situation could have been different.

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Talking about the match, Lahore Qalandars batted first and scored 166 runs for the loss of five wickets thanks to the excellent batting of van der Dusen and Fakhar Zaman. Dawson was dismissed for 54 and Fakhar Zaman for 41 runs.

The bowlers of Multan Sultans have once again shown excellent bowling. Muhammad Ali took two wickets while Abbas Afridi and Osama Mir took one wicket each.

In response, the bowling of Lahore Qalandars, especially Haris Rauf, did not appear in form at all.

This is the reason why Mohammad Rizwan, after playing the initial overs with restraint, started scoring runs quickly and kept the Qalandars in trouble till the end. After Multan Sultans lost three wickets early, bowler David Valley was sent to play at the top spot, who played well with Rizwan.

Muhammad Rizwan scored 82 and David Valley got out for 25 runs, after which Iftikhar Ahmed, who came to bat in the last overs, ended the match by hitting two sixes and five fours.

In the first match of the day played at Gaddafi Stadium Lahore, Karachi Kings defeated Peshawar Zalmi by seven wickets. Fast bowler Hasan Ali and Mir Hamza took 3 and 3 wickets, thanks to which Peshawar Zalmi could only score 154 runs in the first innings. In reply, Kieron Pollard’s unbeaten innings saw Kings achieve this target quite easily.

Choosing to bowl first, Shoaib Malik gave the Kings an ideal start and took the wicket at the loss of just three runs in the first over, while opening batsman Saeem Ayub got the golden egg on the first ball of the day.

In the second over, Babar Azam became the fastest and youngest T20 batsman to complete 10,000 T20 runs. It took just 271 innings to do so. The right-handed batsman achieved the feat after hitting a boundary and then two runs while facing left-arm fast bowler Mir Hamza.

Pollard played an unbeaten innings of 49 off 21 balls which included four fours and as many sixes.