While Islamabad United played on a pitch full of runs on the opening day, their second game was on a pitch which had little for the batsmen. The United side which is built on a Ronchi quick start did get that, but they faltered thanks to some good bowling from Multan Sultans.
Multan Sultans won the toss and elected to field first. Rizwan Hussain became the first to lose his wicket as he played a nothing shot off to be caught at short cover, wickets continued to fall as Islamabad United lost half their side with 58 balls yet to be bowled in the innings and with just 71 runs on the board.
Shahid Afridi (2/18) and Ali Shafiq (2/11) were the pick of the bowlers for Multan Sultans. Ali Shafiq bowled the hard to hit lengths and targeted the line outside off, with some swing on offer for him it got a bit difficult for the batsmen to play him out. Shahid Afridi got out his bag of tricks to bamboozle the United batsmen, the leg break, googly, top spinner and at one point even the seam up delivery was on display as the United batsmen had no answers for his variations.
Ronchi was the only silver lining in the dark cloud of the United batting, when he was out he had scored 51 of the 61 runs Islamabad United had scored, but even he did struggle early on with the lack of pace on pitch, majority of his runs came against one Russell and one Green over as he scored 32 runs off 9 balls of their bowling.
Islamabad United eventually got to 125 which was a below-par score on this pitch, but given how the pitch played and the bowlers they had at their disposal they would have still fancied their chances.
The only way Islamabad United could have won this game was if they picked wickets, while they did get the wicket of Johnson Charles in the 2nd over, they had to wait until the 8th over for the second wicket. They managed to make run scoring difficult for Sultans, with the required run rate touching 9 with 7 overs to go and touched 9.8 runs per over with 5 overs to go. With 5 overs to go Sultans still had 49 runs to get but they did have the services of Andre Russell, 17 runs came in the 16th over with 15 runs coming from Dre’s bat as the RRR fell to 8 per over.
With the RRR well under check and with Malik and Afridi still out there with the bat there was not much United could do as they lost their first game of PSL 4 and also their first game against Multan Sultans.