Rajasthan Royals have often called the Sawai Man Singh stadium their citadel, a fortress where they rarely lose. And for the 15th game of the 19 that they have played here, the Rajasthan Royals cruised to a close win over the Pune Warriors India.
The victory came in the final over thanks to the man of the match performance by Ross Taylor towards the end of the innings apart from some excellent bowling when the Warriors had batted. 
The Royals won the toss and invited the Warriors into bat. Changing their batting line-up, the Warriors opened with Jesse Ryder and Manish Pandey. While Johan Botha had Ryder dismissed early, the pair of Pandey and the number three batter Robin Uthappa looked be accelerating well towards a strong score.
At 70/1 in the ninth over and the two batsmen looking set to go on and bigger ones, the Royals could have easily panicked. Instead, through some tight bowling from the spinners, Rajasthan clawed back into the game. Warne, who was getting no help from the umpires changed his end and immediately had the wicket of Uthappa after he had been hit for three boundaries in the first over.
This was immediately followed by Yuvraj Singh and Pandey trying to set themselves up for a big one. However, Yuvraj was unlucky to be run out at the non-striker’s end when he was out of his crease and the ball tipped off the bowler’s fingers on to the stumps. In the same over, Pandey’s long vigil of 30 was ended by Siddharth Trivedi as he hoicked the ball into the hands of the square-leg.
The rest of the side collapsed to 143/7, which meant that the Royals did not have to score a lot.
That said, at 59/3 in 10.1 overs, the pendulum seemed to have drastically swung in the favour of the Warriors. It was here that the fearless youngster, Ashok Menaria got together with Taylor and the pair added a quick-fire 33 for the fourth wicket. Menaria hit three sixes in his 29 and that had swung the momentum well into the Royals’ favour.
Taylor then smacked a 35-ball 47 and guided the side to win with his thundering slog sweeps to the boundary./
With this loss, the Warriors have now lost six games in a row, following the first two wins in the competition. They have only four points from eight game and there cannot be too much doubt that they need to win almost all of the remaining six games to have a chance of going through to the next time. For now though, Rajasthan are at the top of the table and will look to finish in the top two positions of the points table, to give them a better chance of going through to the next stage.