Vaibhav Sooryavanshi lit up Jaipur with a breathtaking 103 off 37 balls, but Sunrisers Hyderabad still stormed past Rajasthan Royals’ 228 for 6, sealing a five-wicket win with nine balls left in a chase that barely seemed possible when the innings break arrived. SRH finished on 229 for 5 in 18.3 overs, with Ishan Kishan’s 74 off 31 and Abhishek Sharma’s 57 off 29 tearing the game open early.
The night, at least for a while, belonged entirely to Sooryavanshi. He reached his hundred in just 36 balls and finished with 12 sixes and five fours, batting at a strike rate above 278. It was one of those innings that made everything else on the ground feel secondary. Rajasthan needed it too. Outside his assault and Dhruv Jurel’s measured 51 from 35, the rest of the innings never quite found the same rhythm, and that would matter later.
Rajasthan’s 228 still looked huge. In most games, it wins. Here, it barely slowed Hyderabad down.
SRH lost Travis Head in the first over, which might have settled a lesser batting side. It didn’t. Abhishek came out swinging, Kishan went even harder, and together they flipped the chase from daunting to oddly manageable. The pair added 132 in just 55 balls, a stand that left Rajasthan scrambling for answers and the asking rate suddenly feeling less like pressure and more like invitation.
Kishan, named Player of the Match, was savage through the off side and just as sharp when Rajasthan dragged short. Abhishek, meanwhile, gave the innings its first real jolt, cracking 11 fours in a 29-ball fifty-seven that made clear SRH were not interested in pacing this chase conventionally. By the time both were gone, the damage had already been done.
There was still work left, and for a few overs Rajasthan threatened to drag the game back into chaos. Heinrich Klaasen made 29, Nitish Kumar Reddy added 36 from 18, and SRH kept finding boundaries at the exact moments RR needed dots. In the end, the visitors crossed the line at 229 for 5, completing one of the standout chases of the season.
The result left a slightly cruel image hanging over the night: a teenager producing a ridiculous hundred, only to watch it dissolve under an even more ruthless reply. That’s T20, brutally condensed. Sooryavanshi gave Rajasthan a total that should have felt safe. Hyderabad treated it like a target worth attacking from ball one.
There’s another layer here too. SRH had already beaten Rajasthan earlier in the season, and this chase underlined the same thing in louder fashion: when their top order clicks, they can make even 229 look vulnerable. For Rajasthan, the concern is harder to ignore. A once-in-a-match innings from Sooryavanshi still wasn’t enough, because the bowling never really gained control after the first wicket.
For neutral fans, it was chaos of the good kind. For Rajasthan Royals, it will sting. And for Sooryavanshi, whose hundred should’ve been the story of the night, it became something rarer and probably more painful: a masterpiece overshadowed by an even louder finish.
