Lahore Qalandars finally stop the Multan Sultans train in Pakistan Super League

Shaheen Shah Afridi’s men started their home leg in a tremendous fashion bringing a stop to the Multan Sultans train on Friday, 12 February. A huge 52-run victore for Lahore Qalandars meant that not only did they win two points they went up to the second spot in the points table with a big boost in their net run rate.

Lahore dominated Sultans through the game, first with their batting exploits against a strong bowling lineup consisting of Shahnawaz Dahani and Imran Tahir who were very good in their last game. It was once again the terrific Fakhar Zaman who raked yet another half century of the PSL season and scored a 37-ball 60. His act was followed up by Kamran Ghulam (42 off 38), Mohammad Hafeez (43 off 29) and Phil Salt (26 off 13) which took their score up to 182 runs in their four overs.

Returning for the bowling performance, Lahore knew that Multan had the firepower to chase this down. And rightly so since Multan have scored three double hundred scores this season.

Lahore had to get either of the two openers early to stamp their authority in the game and they did so by removing in form Shan Masood in the third over of the game. Captain Shaheen Shah Afridi knew that Multan had to throw everything at them to chase the score down, so he tricked the opener with a change of pace in the final ball of the over. Masood - who was looking for a big shot - chose to check his hit reading the slower one, but only managed to lob it to covers, where a diving effort ended his night.

Rashid Khan did the rest dismissing Mohammad Rizwan and Rilee Rossouw in back to back deliveries in the 9th over to more or less seal the fate of the game.

From there on it was a similar story of Multan Sultans batsmen hitting boundaries and then getting out looking for big shots.

Both big hitters - Tim David and Khushdil Shah had entertaining stays and blasted off from the word go, but failed to add anything significant to the scoreboard.

The entire bowling unit of Lahore came to party picking at least two wickets each barring David Wiese, who was wicketless on the night but bowled with a superb economy of 6.5 in his four overs. Wickets came tumbling throughout the second half of the chase and Multan were bowled out for 130 runs in 19.3 overs.

With the win Lahore Qalandars climbed to the second spot of the table which is still dominated by Sultans by 12 points from 7 games. Qalandars are four points behind them scoring 8 from 6 matches.