Sunrisers Hyderabad’s Shahbaz Ahmed and Abhishek Sharma shared 5 wickets to help their team enter the finals of IPL 2024 with a comfortable 36-run win over Rajasthan Royals in Qualifier 2 on Friday, allowing them to rightfully cut victory cake when their team returned to the Chennai hotel.
SRH had earlier been beaten by Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) in Qualifier 1 and they will face off again against the same opponents on Sunday for the championship.SRH previously won the title in 2016 while KKR have lifted it twice before – in 2012 and 2014.
On Friday during qualifier two, SRH ended up with an overall score of175 runs for nine wickets as a result of Heinrich Klaasen’s half-century that came off just thirty four balls. The duo of left-arm spinners Shahbaz (3 for 23) and Abhishek (2 for 24) squeezed life out of Rajasthan as they made every stroke look like they were trying to untie themselves from twisted ropes.
Abhishek has made most of his runs through some fantastic batting, scoring around four hundred seventy runs in fourteen innings.But he added only twelve more runs on Friday because finally his spell was capped at two wickets after he dismissed Sanju Samson (10) and Shimron Hetmyer (4), which took Sunrisers Hyderabad right through to the final match.
At the hotel lobby entrance where Sunrisers Hyderbad players walked into after arriving from MA Chidambaram Stadium, there was a cake organized by hotel staffs which were cut by these twin spinners. One can imagine that Shahbaz had no idea what was coming next when one member of his team took a big piece from this cake then smeared it all over Shahbaz’s face as everybody else laughed around him.
Moreover there are acts like fun where skipper Pat Cummins, Klaasen and Shahbaz connect with the fans from SRH dressing room after a victory.
