Mohali

Punjab Kings (PBKS) suffered an agonising two-run defeat at home against SunRisers Hyderabad (SRH) after surrendering the initial advantage where they had the opposition batters on the rope. Set a challenging target of 183, PBKS could not conjure up enough partnerships to finish the chase, despite the late heroics of Shashank Singh and Ashutosh Sharma. 

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The duo did threaten to pull off a similar heist, as they did against Gujarat Titans in the previous match by scoring 26 runs off the last over but could not get over the line. Singh once again showed that PBKS invested in the right entity with his superlative power-hitting. 

"I feel that Shashank and Ashutosh played a great knock, we restricted them to a good total, but we couldn't cash in on the first 6 overs, lost 3 wickets and that's where we fell behind and it cost us in the end," said losing captain Shikhar Dhawan in the post-match conference. 

The tone for the defence was set by Bhuvneshwar Kumar who started with a maiden over against Dhawan. The pressure of six dot balls was transferred to Jonny Bairstow who attempted to slog across the line and had his offstump flattened by SRH captain Pat Cummins.

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Coming into bat at no. 3, Prabhsimran Singh had another disappointing outing and got out trying to manufacture something out of the ordinary. However, the moment of the match came when Heinrich Klaasen came up to the stumps with Bhuvneshwar bowling and stumped Dhawan who charged down the track, in what was a completely suicidal move.

With three wickets down in the powerplay, PBKS never looked like recovering as SRH bowlers kept coming at them relentlessly. Cummins and T Natarajan chipped in with a couple of wickets and kept a lid on the scoring rate up until that final burst from the PBKS duo. 

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PBKS surrender advantage

Bowling first, PBKS were all over SRH, courtesy of Arshdeep Singh who picked up four wickets and was pivotal in stopping the likes of Travis Head and Aiden Markram from going big. Head could not do much damage despite having a reprieve when Kings did not take a review after he had edged the ball to the keeper. 

Sam Curran sent Abhishek Sharma to the hut and up until the 15th over, it looked certain that PBKS would restrict SRH to anything below 160. However, Harpreet Brar and Harshal Patel were taken to the cleaners in successive overs and the momentum shifted from there. 

SRH batters shifted the throttle and went slam bang in the final five which helped them put up the challenging total that proved just about enough in the end. The win meant that SRH and PBKS maintained their fifth and sixth spot respectively on the points table.