Shubman Gill‘s century helped Gujarat Titans chase down the target of 198 against RCB, at the M. Chinnaswamy stadium, in the last league game of IPL 2023.
This knocked RCB out of the IPL 2023, sending Mumbai Indians into the playoffs as the fourth team, joining GT, CSK, and LSG in the playoffs.
Virat Kohli‘s lone-man battle – a second century in a row, and 7th overall in his IPL career, going past Chris Gayle’s tally of 7 IPL tons – took RCB to a total of 197.
While Virat Kohli became only the third batsman in the IPL history to register back-to-back centuries, Shubman Gill joined the list with his second consecutive century. Getting to his hundred in style with a six in the last over of the chase, Gill scored an unbeaten 104 off 52 balls, winning the game for GT, propelling MI into the playoffs, and crashing RCB’s IPL trophy dreams once again.
As RCB got knocked out, the LSG Twitter admin insulted ‘KING’ Virat Kohli using this century from Shubman Gill.
Shubman Gill is hailed as the Prince of Indian batting, and this match felt like a passiing of the baton from King Kohli to Prince Shubman Gill.
However, the LSG Twitter admin posted this to insult the KING-ness of Virat Kohli:
Prince?
He's already a 👑 pic.twitter.com/l7m6USWVGP
— Lucknow Super Giants (@LucknowIPL) May 21, 2023
LSG and Virat Kohli had had an issue earlier this season and that doesn’t seem to have stemmed. Non-RCB fans were also rooting for RCB to reach the playoffs as the Eliminator would have been between RCB and LSG. But alas, that wouldn’t happen this season.
After the loss, RCB skipper Faf du Plessis said: “Very disappointed. We played a really strong team tonight, an amazing hundred from Shubman. It was really wet in the second innings. It was wet in the first innings as well, but there wasn’t a lot of grip in the second innings and also we had to change the ball quite a few times during the second innings. Virat played an unbelievable knock to give us a chance and thought that was a good score, but shubman played incredibly well to take the game away from us. From a batting perspective, the top 4 contributed really well. We missed a few runs from the middle order consistently throughout the season, especially in the back end of the innings, and also in the middle overs perhaps didn’t get as many wickets as we would have liked.”
On Virat Kohli, Faf added: “He (Kohli) played really good cricket throughout the season and as a partnership probably not a single game where we had anything under 40 as an opening combination. We need to improve well on finishing games especially in the back end. Last year DK had a purple patch and was finishing games left, right and centre, but this season it wasn’t to be. And if you see the teams that succeed they have some good hitters at five at six probably six and seven.”
