Nitish Rana’s fearless batting as the new No. 3 for Rajasthan Royals (RR) propelled them to a score of 182 in their match against Chennai Super Kings (CSK) in the quest for their first victory in IPL 2025. Although RR seemed poised for an even larger total, timely wickets from Matheesha Pathirana and Khaleel Ahmed prevented them from surpassing their target.
In their initial two games of the season against SRH and KKR, RR’s skipper Riyan Parag had held the No. 3 spot. Even their coach Rahul Dravid had expressed his confidence in him at that position before their match against CSK. However, RR surprised everyone by promoting Rana to No. 3 ahead of Parag, and he once again excelled in his face-off with R Ashwin.
Prior to the match on Sunday, Rana had scored an impressive 108 runs off of 58 balls from the spinner without being dismissed in the IPL. In the fifth over, he confidently faced the spinner once again and achieved a sequence of 6, 6, and 4. It wasn’t until his 71st ball faced against Ashwin that Rana was finally dismissed for the first time in the IPL, having added another 33 runs to his total, bringing it to a remarkable 141.
Related Post
Utilizing one of his classic tactics – a momentary pause followed by a skillful delivery – Ashwin successfully caught Rana off guard and had him out for 81 runs in just 36 balls with an off-side wide. The majority of those runs, 58 to be exact, were accumulated during the powerplay. In comparison, the combined efforts of Sanju Samson and Yashasvi Jaiswal only amounted to a total of 20 runs in the initial six overs.
In his first over, Noor quickly took out Samson for 20 runs in just 16 balls. He continued his success by getting Dhruv Jurel out for 3 runs in only 7 balls. Later on, Vijay Shankar made an impressive catch as he charged in from deep midwicket to dismiss the batting of Wanindu Hasaranga, who was surprisingly moved up to No. 6 instead of Shimron Hetmyer. Hasaranga only managed to score 4 runs off 5 balls before being removed from the game.
Had Jamie Overton not dropped a catch, Hetmyer may have been sent back to the pavilion with only 3 runs. Unfortunately for him, his night took a turn for the worse as he gave away 30 runs in just two overs during the powerplay. Fortunately, Khaleel and Pathirana were able to contain RR’s score below 200 with their impressive bowling in the latter stages of the match. This was crucial, especially when Rana was dominating at the crease and a big total seemed inevitable.
