By Prakash Nair 
Lucknow, April 22: Lucknow Super Giants lost again. Four in a row now. And this one was not even close.
Rajasthan Royals beat them by 40 runs at Ekana tonight, bowling LSG out for 119 chasing 160. The margin is large enough, but it is the speed and the manner of the collapse that will hurt most. By the fifth over of the chase, three wickets were down, and the match was effectively settled. Everything that followed was just the formality of watching it fall apart.
Archer Just Ended the Chase Before It Started
LSG needed one thing more than anything else tonight. A start. A platform. Someone to see off the new ball and give the middle order something to build on.
They got the opposite.
Ayush Badoni went early, run out by sharp fielding before he had a chance to settle. Then Archer got to work. A vicious bumper at Markram, extracting steep bounce from short of a length, hurried him into a mistimed pull. The ball kissed the edge at 147.4kph and Jurel, moving back quickly, completed the catch. Markram out for a duck.
Three balls later, Pant was gone too. Nandre Burger, bowling at 142.7kph, drew him into an aggressive stroke outside off. Pant bit. And that was that.
Two wickets for nought. The captain. The most experienced bat in the lineup. Both back in the hut before the innings had found its legs. By the fifth over LSG were 22 for 3, with Pooran on the crease trying to fend off Archer, who was hitting 151kph and not letting anything settle. The chase was not wobbling. It was over.
Pooran’s Highest Score of the Season Came Far Too Late
There was a brief moment where it seemed like Nicholas Pooran remembered who he was supposed to be.
A sumptuous flick off his first ball. A pull behind square. An exquisite cover drive back-to-back off Brijesh Sharma. He moved to a run-a-ball 14 at one point, and LSG were 40 for 3 in the seventh over. Small mercies. But the game needed him to do that for fifteen overs, not three.
Jadeja then bowled one across him, outside off, and Pooran misjudged it completely, heaving straight to long-on. Out for 22. LSG 54 for 4 in the tenth over.
That 22 was his highest score of IPL 2026. A man retained for Rs 21 crore, playing his best innings of the season in a game that was already lost. That is the quiet tragedy sitting at the heart of LSG’s batting problems this year.
Jadeja Was the One Nobody Talked About Beforehand
Everyone expected Archer to be the story. And he was, in the powerplay. But the over that really killed the chase came from a very different source.
Ravindra Jadeja finished with 2 wickets for just 8 runs in 3 overs. On a surface that gripped, his low trajectory and subtle variations made scoring almost impossible. No drama, no aggression, just relentless accuracy. The bowler everyone had written off as a diminished figure this season turned in the kind of spell that used to be routine for him, and it came at exactly the wrong time for Lucknow.
Archer, Burger, Yash Raj Punja, and Bishnoi all chipped in with a wicket each. It was not a single collapse. It was a slow, methodical dismantling. The wickets kept coming, the run rate kept climbing, and nobody in the LSG lineup had a credible answer to any of it.
What RR Built in the First Innings
The 159 that RR posted never felt like a match-winning total when it was set. It felt chaseable. On a ground that had backed chasers all season, it felt exactly like the kind of score LSG should have been able to overhaul.
Sooryavanshi and Jaiswal scored 46 and 39, respectively, but nothing below them amounted to much. The middle order was quiet again. Parag got 20. Hetmyer and Jadeja were minimal contributors with the bat. The top two did the work, and everyone else filled in the gaps without making any real statement.
And yet 159 was enough. Comfortably enough, as it turned out.
Sooryavanshi reached 500 IPL runs in just 227 balls tonight, the fastest in the tournament’s history, breaking Glenn Maxwell’s record of 260 balls. He was dismissed cutting to cover, trying to go big on a stopping surface, but not before he had done everything an opener should do in the powerplay. That record will not make headlines the way it should, because the story tonight was always going to be what happened in the second innings.
The Changes Did Not Change Enough
LSG went into this game with two changes. Mayank Yadav played his first match of the season, replacing Avesh Khan. Digvesh Rathi came in for M Siddharth. The thinking behind both was sound. Fresh legs, different options, a signal to the team that something had to change.
Mayank showed flashes in the first innings. Real pace, real threat. The kind of bowling that reminded you why this team spent so much to keep him. But one player’s return, however exciting, cannot compensate for a batting unit that lost three wickets inside five overs of a 160-run chase.
The toss was right. The bowling in the first innings was respectable. But when your batters hand the game back at 22 for 3 in the fifth over, none of the rest of it matters.
Four Straight. The Playoffs Are Now a Long Shot
Lucknow have two wins from seven games. They are ninth on the table. They are losing at home. They are losing on the road. And tonight they were bowled out chasing a total that, on a ground favouring chasers, should have been manageable.
At some point you stop asking about batting combinations and start asking harder questions. About belief. About temperament. About whether this group of players, talented as they individually are, has the collective resolve to turn a season like this around.
For Rajasthan Royals, this was exactly what they needed. The losing run is over. Archer is back to his most dangerous. Jadeja showed tonight that the old instincts are still there. And Sooryavanshi, still 15 years old, broke an IPL record on a night when nobody was really watching.
That last part, maybe, says everything.
Match Summary
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Match | IPL 2026, Match 32 |
| Date | April 22, 2026 |
| Venue | Bharat Ratna Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee Ekana Cricket Stadium, Lucknow |
| Team 1 | Rajasthan Royals |
| Team 1 Score | 159/6 (20 overs) |
| Team 2 | Lucknow Super Giants |
| Team 2 Score | 119 all out (17.3 overs) |
| Result | Rajasthan Royals won by 40 runs |
| Player of the Match | Jofra Archer |
| Toss | LSG won, elected to field |
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- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
- Prakash Nair
