Thailand's Nattakan Chantam brings cricketing world to a standstill with her stunning save near boundary rope

Trailblazers, led by Smriti Mandhana, are up against Harmanpreet Kaur’s Supernovas in the final of the 2020 edition of the Women’s T20 Challenge at the Sharjah Cricket Stadium. In their last outing against each other, Supernovas had registered a victory over Trailblazers by two runs to confirm a berth against the latter in the final.

The toss went in the favour of Harmanpreet and she invited the Trailblazers to bat first. The opening duo of Deandra Dottin and Smriti Mandhana provided a good start to Trailblazers as they collected a 71-run stand in 11 overs. However, in the middle of the innings, the Supernovas spinners got better off the opposition batting line-up as Radha Yadav took a five-wicket haul to shift momentum towards her side.

A brilliant bowling effort by Supernovas resulted in Trailblazers getting restricted to a below-par total of 118 for 8 overs in their 20 overs. They could manage to score just 17 runs off the last 5 overs. The skipper Smriti was the highest run-getter for her team with a knock of 68 runs off 49 deliveries.

Nattakan Chantam saves two runs for her team Trailblazers

In reply, Chamari Athapaththu and Jemimah Rodrigues opened the innings for Supernovas. Jhulan Goswami gave just three runs in the first over and the captain handed the ball to Sophie Ecclestone for the second over. On the first ball of the second over, Rodrigues tried to hit Ecclestone for a boundary towards the third man. But a brilliant fielding by Nattakan Chantam saved two runs for her team Trailblazers.

To prevent the boundary, Chantam sprinted back from the short third man and made a massive dive near the third man fence to flick the ball back to the field before it could touch the boundary.

The stunning effort by Nattakan impressed the cricket writer Paul Radley as he took to his official Twitter handle to hurl praises on the cricketer for her acrobatic fielding skills. Paul tweeted, “Sharjah is the place to go for diving boundary stops. This just now from Nattakan Chantam in the Women’s T20 Challenge. Needs to put a bit more effort in, I’d say, she’s left a bit out there”

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