Royal Challengers Bangalore won the inaugural match of IPL 2021

Royal Challengers Bangalore started their IPL 2021 campaign by beating the defending champion Mumbai Indians. Virat Kohli’s men beat Mumbai Indians by 2 wickets.

RCB won the toss and elected to bowl first. In the first innings, Mumbai Indians scored 159 runs in 20 overs. Chris Lynn [49 of 35], Suryakumar Yadav [31 of 23], and Ishan Kishan [28 of 19] played their part. Harshal Patel took 5 wickets in his 4 overs for RCB.

However, while chasing, RCB lose some early wickets. But Virat Kohli [33 of 29] and Glenn Maxwell [39 of 28] have played their part to keep RCB in the match. Later AB de Villiers played a blistering knock [48 of 27] to seal the victory for his side. RCB’s Harshal Patel was named as the Man of the Match.

After the match, Mumbai Indians skipper Rohit Sharma was disappointed with his team’s performance. But he wanted to move on as it was just the match of the tournament. He said, “That’s the most important thing, I guess (to win tournaments). Not the first game. I thought it was a great effort. Great fight till the end. I thought we were 20 runs short with the kind of start we got. We made some mistakes in the first game, bound to happen.”

“We wanted to get wickets when AB and Christian were batting, which is why we went with Bumrah and Boult, unfortunately, it didn’t work. Definitely not an easy pitch to bat on. We need to identify the situations and get variations. AB was brilliant and got them home.”-he added.

On the other hand, RCB skipper Virat Kohli is not ready to celebrate right now. He said, “We won the first match last year as well that we played. It was important to play against the strongest side in the competition and test our side. Everyone was involved in this game, and when you win by two wickets, it means that everyone has gone in and played.”