Jyothi, who had won two silver medals in the competition so far in the Compound Women's Team and Compound Mixed Team on Friday, defeated her Italian opponent 148-146 in a closely-fought last-four encounter. The 25-year-old Indian seeded sixth following the ranking round will meet top-seed Sara Lopez of Colombia in the final. Sara defeated Slovenia's Toja Ellison 150-147 in the other semi-final.
Hyderabad had a horror start as David Warner (2) was dismissed on the third ball of the chase. On a short and outside off delivery from Shami, Warner nicked behind to keeper KL Rahul. Shami had his second wicket of the match when captain Kane Williamson (1) chopped on to his leg-stump while going for the drive. Shami was brilliant in the power-play, conceding only five runs for big scalps of Warner and Williamson.
"As it was the team's second offence of the season under the IPL's Code of Conduct relating to minimum over rate offences, Rajasthan Royals captain Sanju Samson was fined Rs 24 lakh. The rest of the members of the playing XI were each fined lesser of either Rs 6 lakh or 25 percent of their individual match fee," said a release from the Indian Premier League (IPL).
Sania-Zhang, seeded second here, defeated the Japanese pair 6-2, 7-5 in an hour and 20 minutes and await the winner of the other semi-final between Pola'd's Magda Linette and Bernarda Pera of the USA, the top seeds, and the American-Kiwi team of Kaitlyn Christian and Erin Routliffe. Sania and Zhang had reached the semi-finals by beating Anna Danilina of Kazakhstan and Lidziya Marozava of Belarus 6-3, 2-6 10-6.
Sent in to bat first, Punjab didn't get the best of the starts with only 26 runs scored in four overs. KL Rahul and Mayank Agarwal struggled to time the ball. Bhuvneshwar Kumar threatened Rahul's outside edge but with no success as Rahul got away with streaky boundaries. Rahul's sluggish stay at the crease came to an end when he flicked straight to mid-wicket off Jason Holder's first ball of the match in the fifth over.
The 34-year-old spinner has 140 wickets to his name in the IPL while he bagged 52 wickets for India in 46 T20Is. The rest of his wickets came in the domestic circuit. He is the sixth-highest wicket-taker in the IPL. Veteran pacer Lasith Malinga leads the chart in IPL with 170 scalps followed by Amit Mishra (160), Piyush Chawla (156), Dwayne Bravo (154), and Harbhajan Singh (150).
