IPL Match 4, Mumbai: Chennai Super Kings Captain and legendary cricketer MS Dhoni started a new trend in cricket sometime in the 2000s, which was to deny a single run to stay on strike in the death overs. This trend was later followed by other batsmen when there’s a bowler or a weak batsman at the other end. While batting for the Rajasthan Royals (RR), Sanju Samson did a similar thing on Monday, during Rajasthan Royals vs Punjab Kings match, when he denied a single to Chris Morris on the second-last ball of the innings. As it turned out, RR lost the match by four runs.
Here’s the full story of what transpired. There were 5 runs needed of 2 balls, Samson is on strike, Morris is at the other end. Arshdeep Singh bowls a good delivery, Samson smashed the ball down to long off but he denied taking a single, thus retained the strike. The dug-out was amused, and so was Morris. No one could actually believe that Samson denied a single to Chris Morris. Just to keep things in perspective, Morris has a strike rate of 156 in IPL cricket. So, after this lapse, Samson had to score five runs of the last ball. Which means, now Samson has to hit a maximum to take Rajasthan Royals to victory. Samson scooped the ball over extra cover but the ball went straight in the hands of Deepak Hooda.
Morris was astonished standing at the other end. Sanju Samson played so well to reach the score of 119 (63), but failed to take his team over the line due to a silly lapse in concentration. During the innings, Samson also crossed the hurdle of 2000 runs as a RR player.
Twitter, like always had a funny way to look at the incident. Here are some funny memes shared on the Samson-Morris incident:
Punjab and Rajasthan, both will play their next matches against Chennai Super Kings.