Brisbane, July 28: With the third season of the Champions League Twenty20 very much in sight now, the participating teams will already have an eye on their players’ performances and current form. IPL 2011 runners-up Royal Challengers Bangalore have something to smile about in this regard as one of their young stars, Saurabh Tiwary, is making bowlers sweat in the Emerging Players Tournament (EPT) being played in Australia.
With vital contributions in the first three matches of the Twenty20 tournament, Tiwary has shown terrific signs of regaining his form that had deserted him in the IPL. While his 22-ball 34 saw the India Emerging Players team home against their Kiwi counterparts in the opening match of the tournament, his blitz of 29 runs from 14 balls helped his team put up a match-winning total against the Australian Institute of Sport. Even in the loss against the South African colts, Tiwary shone with an unbeaten 40 runs from 32 deliveries, comprising four sixes. On the whole, the Jharkhand lad stands second on the list of six-hitters so far with nine hits over the fence.
There is still a long way to go in the tournament but Tiwary’s tally of 103 runs from three games at an average of 51.50, and a strike rate of more than 150, should give a lot of confidence to the RCB think tank (the team shelled out USD 1.6 million to secure his services at the IPL Player Auction 2011). They didn’t get the expected output from Tiwary in IPL 2011 (he scored 187 runs from 16 matches at a strike rate of 99.46) but his current form marks him out as one to watch out for in the upcoming CLT20
