Mayank Agarwal-led Punjab Kings beat Royal Challengers Bangalore by 5 wickets in the their tournament opener. It was a high-scoring game at the DY Patil Sports Academy in Mumbai as batting first, RCB put on 205 runs on the board with help of skipper Faf du Plessis’ 88 and Virat Kohli’s 41.
Later Punjab Kings started off on a good note with an impressive first wicket partnership of 71 runs.
Shikhar Dhawan and Bhanuka Rajpaksa scored 43 each. Towards the end, Shahrukh Khan and Odean Smith added 24 and 25 each to guide their team to chase down the big total.
“We were stressing on having a good start. We just needed to have that belief. Didn’t go so well with the bowling. I need to work on a few things. Batting was good as I helped my team to win. It was all about execution and I couldn’t and that’s why it went haywire. Punjab hasn’t won the title so far but we need to have the belief. We watched ’14 peaks’, 13 remain for us,” said Odean Smith, Man of the Match.
