Steven Smith won the toss and asked Sunrisers Hyderabad to bat first. Unlike their last match, Sunrisers’ start in this match was poor. Shikhar Dhawan just couldn’t get going in Tim Southee’s first over. He was beaten by the swing and flashed to yield an outside edge that fell just short of Smith at slip. But Dhawan didn’t last long as he edged Dhawal Kulkarni to be caught behind for 10 runs that came off 12 balls. On the other side, David Warner looked like continuing from his previous innings against RCB. Of the first four balls that he faced from Chris Morris, he struck three boundaries and lifted Southee for a big six. But Warner was run out in trying to steal a single. Lokesh Rahul set off for a single after the ball hit his pads but Warner was a tad slower even as Rahane hurled the ball from backward point. The direct hit shattered the stumps at the striker’s end with Warner quite far off. The fall of Warner at 35/2 became 35/3 with Dhawal Kulkarni claiming Lokesh Rahul with the first ball of his second over after taking Dhawan on the last ball of his first. Naman Ojha and Eoin Morgan kept going but could not lift the rate of scoring. After 10 overs, SRH could only reach 55/3. Later, when Smith brought Pravin Tambe from one end, runs almost dried up. The wily leg spinner foxed the batmen with some accurate bowling and claimed the wickets of both Ojha and Morgan. In his quota of 4 overs, Tambe yielded just 21 runs. Despite Bopara and Ashish Reddy going for some big hits in the slog overs, SRH could only reach 127/5 in 20 overs.
Scoring 128 for victory was not so difficult for the Royals as openers Ajinkya Rahane and Sanju Samson set about building the chase but the pace of scoring was slow because of the inherent nature of the Visakhapatnam pitch. After adding 64 for the first wicket, Samson departed. Ravi Bopara delivered the breakthrough by luring the batsman into opening the face of his bat to a drive through the vacant slip. Instead, he got a nick and Naman Ojha plucked out a smart one-handed catch. Skipper Smith didn’t last long as he was deceived by Karn Sharma’s flight and holed out to Warner in the deep. Even after Karun Nair fell in the 15th over, RR still looked like ending up as winners with just 36 required off 32 balls. But Karn Sharma and Ravi Bopara made scoring difficult for RR as the innings progressed. Somehow, things turned sour for the Royals in the last two overs. When Rahane got out in the 19th over, SRH smelt their chance. They made field changes and pressurized the RR batsmen. Stuart Binny and James Faulkner couldn’t score as freely as they wanted. Praveen Kumar’s last over took the game on the razor’s edge. He was thrifty and almost succeeded in engineering a run-out. But RR finally scored their fourth successive IPL victory off the very last ball with Faulkner hitting Praveen Kumar for four.