Rajasthan Royals needed only 18 runs to win in 2 overs; Know why they lost the match

Royal Challengers Bangalore defeated Rajasthan Royals by 11 runs at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium on Thursday, thanks to Josh Hazlewood's four wickets for 33 runs. This is RCB's first home win in the Indian Premier League 2025. On the other hand, the Rajasthan Royals lost their 5th match in a row and are almost out of the playoff race. They needed 18 runs to win in the last 2 overs, but in the last 12 balls, Bangalore bowlers conceded only 6 runs and took 3 wickets to win the match.

Earlier, thanks to half-centuries from Virat Kohli and Devdutt Padikkal as well as brilliant innings from Tim David and Jitesh Sharma, RCB scored 205/5, which was their highest score on home ground this season. After this, the RR batsmen played with full force and chased the target. But, it could not achieve the target. Hazelwood bowled a memorable over for his team, giving just one run and taking two wickets to seal RCB's victory and give his home crowd a chance to celebrate. RR once again failed to achieve the target.

Opener Yashasvi Jaiswal played an innings of 49 runs for RR. But the team could not achieve the target due to wickets falling regularly. Talking about RCB's batting, thanks to half-centuries from Virat Kohli (70) and Devdutt Padikkal (50), Royal Challengers Bangalore scored a strong score of 205 for five in 20 overs in the IPL match against Rajasthan Royals on Thursday. Virat and Padikkal shared a big 105-run partnership for the second wicket. Virat hit eight fours and two sixes in his 70-run innings off 42 balls.

Virat scored his fifth half-century in nine innings this season. With this, Virat broke Babar Azam's record of scoring the most fifty-plus scores while batting first in T20. Azam has 61 half-centuries to his name while this is Virat's 62nd half-century. RCB had a good start. Although the run rate slowed down in the middle, the pitch did not look that easy for batting. Kohli and Padikkal handled the innings in the middle overs and both the batsmen also scored half-centuries. In the end, RCB scored more than 200 runs with the attack of David and Jitesh.

Achieving the target of 206 runs was not a big problem at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru. Vaibhav Suryavanshi and Jaiswal started well and took the team past 50 in the 5th over itself. After Suryavanshi was out, Jaiswal was also out in the sixth over. After this, wickets fell continuously but Dhruv Jurel scored 47 runs and made the match. In the last 2 overs, the team needed only 18 runs to win. But they could only score 1 run in the 19th over and 5 runs in the 20th over and Rajasthan lost the 5th consecutive match.