Owais Shah and Herschelle Gibbs have scored the fifth most and eighth most runs in top-level Twenty20 cricket, and both will be hoping to take their side all the way in the Champions League T20 tournament.
Tomorrow the Cape Cobras duo will be in action against the defending champions, the Chennai Super Kings, who will be smarting after slipping to a three-wicket defeat to the Mumbai Indians at the weekend, when it had looked at one stage like they would cruise to victory themselves.
Chennai, under the leadership of Indian captain MS Dhoni, know how important victory in tomorrow’s clash is – if they lose their second Group A match out of two, they may well see themselves eliminated before the CLT20 reaches the knockout stage.
The pace-setters in the Cobras’ group are Mumbai, who despite having to make do without talismanic skipper Sachin Tendulkar (toe injury), have managed to pull off two narrow wins in their first two matches.
Should the Cobras, buoyant after a good win against the New South Wales Blues in their opening match on Saturday, pick up a second success in Chennai tomorrow, they would be odds-on to make the play-offs, as they did in 2009 before losing to Trinidad & Tobago.
Shah, 32, played his county cricket for Essex during the 2011 South African winter after a very successful season in all formats with the Cobras. He made a major contribution to the team’s winning the Pro20 title and the SuperSport Series.
Like Gibbs, he is a man for the big occasion, as he showed in the semi-finals and final of the Pro20, when he scored 133 runs for once out in three visits to the crease (semis were best of three, won 2-0).
In terms of run-scoring in T20 cricket at provincial and international level, English cap Shah has raked in 2,845 runs, passing the 50-mark 15 times, with a highest score of 80.
Gibbs, who kicked off the current tournament with a fine 55 off 47 balls to win the man-of-the-match prize against NSW, has reached three figures once in his 2,729 career T20 runs, but has showed he is hungry for lots more.
Nineteen times Gibbs has reached 50 in the format.
Another Cobras man who would love to reach three figures in a T20 innings is JP Duminy, whose 96 not out against Zimbabwe in Kimberley last season made the shortlist for the ICC performance of the year in the short format. Left-hander Duminy has a best of 99, and 16 T20 half-centuries in all to his name, out of 2,429 runs.
In Bangalore last night, Mumbai did superbly to dismiss T&T for a below-par 98.
But an epic fightback from T&T nearly secured a last-gasp win over Mumbai.
Chasing a lowly 99 runs to win, Samuel Badree (1/14) and Ravi Rampaul (3/17) kept the Mumbai Indians’ batting at bay. With Mumbai needing 15 off the final two overs, Rampaul bowled a phenomenal six deliveries, conceding only four runs.
Mumbai then succumbed to two run-outs in the 20th over, with a mixture of poor running, poor judgement and pin-point throwing. But with only two runs required off the final ball, T&T captain, Darren Ganga did not protect the single, and last man Yuzvendra Chahal hit the full toss to scamper through for two to seal the win. - Cape Argus