47-year old Tambe takes a hat-trick in T10 League
What's the story?
Pravin Tambe became the first player in the history of the T10 league to pick up a hattrick against Kerala Knights. The speciality of the feat doubled when Tambe finished with figures of 5 wickets in his quota of 2 overs, thus, becoming the format's first player to achieve a 5-wicket haul.
Tambe signed for Sindhis in its ongoing second edition and played his first game against Knights today. Indeed, age is just a number for the Mumbaikar as he bagged T20 giants like Chris Gayle, Kieron Pollard and Eoin Morgan in the first over.
The background
Tambe last played in the IPL in 2016 and was even overlooked in the 2018 IPL Auctions owing to his age. Amongst the 8 Indian players in the T10 Cricket League this season, Tambe was signed by the Sindhis camp.
World Cup winners Virender Sehwag, Zaheer Khan, Munaf Patel are a part of this exciting tournament hosted at the UAE along with the likes of former Indian players such as Praveen Kumar, RP Singh, and S Badrinath.
The details
Sindhis played their first game of T10 league last night and ended up on the bitter side. However, for today's fixture, they included veteran Tambe in the playing XI and he came into the attack with the new ball.
The first ball went for five-wides but that was probably the only downside of the over as he scalped maverick Chris Gayle in the second delivery of the innings.
Well, the unparalleled success set in when Tambe dismissed Eoin Morgan on the fourth delivery and went through the gates of swashbuckling T20 star Kieron Pollard and Fabian Allen in the succeeding deliveries to complete a splendid hat-trick and end up with 4 wickets in 5 deliveries.
Tambe finished his quota of 2 overs by giving away 9 runs in his second and bagged another wicket of southpaw Upul Tharanga to finish with an outstanding spell of 2-0-15-5, the best figures in the tournament's history.
What's next?
Without a doubt, this feat achieved by Tambe will boost the morale of the Sindhis contingent and will remain in the memory of cricket fans for a long time.
With the format being the shortest, the batsmen will look to slog most of the time and eventually it could lead to bowlers taking more wickets. It will be enthralling to see how the tournament unfolds around the bowler's abilities to contain against the batsman's quest to score.