Twitter Reactions: Asif Ali and Faheem Ashraf help Islamabad kick-start PSL 2019 with a close win

The defending champions Islamabad United had a great start to the fourth edition of the PSL. It was Asif Ali and Faheem Ashraf, who saw the team through a difficult situation and got them over the line. Their heroics under pressure helped the United register a hard and a close-fought win.

Since he contributed both with the bat as well as the ball, Faheem Ashraf was declared the ‘Man of the Match’. The Lahore Qalandars will have a lot of learnings from this encounter. They did everything right till the partnership between Asif Ali and Ashraf snatched the game from their grabs. Also, they’d be highly disappointed with the way they finished their batting innings.

Fakhar Zaman plays a splendid knock

The Qalandars were put into bat first by the Islamabad United in the first game of the season. The team got off to a blistering start with both Fakhar Zaman and Sohail Akhtar going for the big shots. In 10.4 overs, the score was 97 before Akhtar fell for 37. From this stage, the side should have at least got to 200.

However, that wasn’t the case as Zaman fell for 65. AB de Villiers and Anton Devcich were the only other batsmen who got to the double-figures. They scored 24 and 14 runs respectively. In the last 6 overs, they only managed to score 41 runs and lost 6 wickets. Thus, they could put up just 171 runs on the board for the loss of 8 wickets. Faheem Ashraf picked two wickets in the innings.

Rahat Ali picks up 3 wickets in an over but not enough to save the game

Luke Ronchi gave a great start to the Islamabad United in the chase. With 45 runs on the board in the first five overs, they were on great course. However, Rahat Ali struck thrice in the last over of the powerplay bringing the score down to 49/3. After this, there was a good partnership between Cameron Delport and Hussain Talat. But it came at a very slow pace.

Yet, this ensured that they got as close as possible to the target. Both of them perished before the 15th over with the team still requiring 48 runs to win in the last five. Faheem Ashraf and Asif Ali took over from here and got the big shots going. While Ali scored 36 off 19 balls, Ashraf piled up 23 runs in 11 deliveries. Twitterati was glad to see the defending champions start well in the tournament and lashed out at the Qalandars’ middle-order batsmen.

Here is how Twitterati reacted:

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