Tambe stars again as Rajasthan beat Chennai to reach CLT20 final

Toss: Dhoni won the toss and elected to bowl first. Both teams made just one change to the Teams RR XI: R Dravid, A Rahane, S Samson, S Watson, S Binny, B Hodge, D Yagnik, J Faulkner, K Cooper, R Shukla, P Tambe CSK XI: M Vijay, M Hussey, S Raina, DJ Bravo, MS Dhoni, S Badrinath, R Jadeja, C Morris, R Ashwin, J Holder, M Sharma RR 159-8 The Rajasthan innings was all about control. They had not lost in 12 matches at the venue, they knew the conditions and the pitch. They batted well initially and a lot of that was down to the brilliant Ajinkya Rahane (70 from 56 balls). Rajasthan lost Dravid, Cooper and Samson early but a 59-run partnership between Rahane and Watson (32 off 23 balls) gave their innings some momentum. But wickets towards the end saw CSK coming back into the match well. Even Dravid thought that RR were around 15 runs short of the total they needed. CSK 145-8 [caption id=“attachment_1153997” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Brilliant Tambe helped RR beat CSK. BCCI[/caption] CSK knew that their bowlers had done the job but they needed their batsmen to do the trick as they have so often done in the past. But they started off with two run-out – first Hussey and then Vijay; two blows that they never recovered from. Badrinath was foxed by the 41-year-old Tamble, who even had Dhoni on the back foot. Then Tambe also got the wickets of Raina and Bravo to finish with figures of 4-0-10-3. Dhoni had not lasted long either – he was tapped lbw by Rahul Shukla, who is also from Jharkhand. Just like that CSK were reduced to 72-7. But then Ashwin (46 off 28 balls) and Morris (26 off 17 balls) launched a blistering attack to bring CSK within striking distance. But in the end the task proved to be too much for them. Still they at least made a fight of it. Dhoni later said that CSK needed to plan their batting better. “We depend too much on individuals.” Result: Rajasthan won by 14 runs. Dravid on Tambe “It goes down to the number of hours he has bowled over a couple of decades. He has great control. He took some time off after the IPL and has really worked on his bowling. He is always speaking to the big players and figuring out how he needs to bowl to batsmen when they are going after him.” “You can have the skills but to perform on the big stage against some big batsmen is never easy. He has shown he’s got it” Tweets

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