If you watched yesterday’s game between RCB and KKR, you would know that there was very little chance that RCB could have lost a game when opposition needed 90 odd runs from just the 7 overs. It was only the 9th instance when the bowling team lost a match after conceding that many runs in 7 overs, and RCB fans might not like it, but the team has been a part of such instances 6 times. With that loss, it was RCB’s 5th straight loss of the season which now makes it even more difficult for them to qualify for the playoffs in yet another season of the IPL.
Kohli after the match said, “”If we bowl like that, [and] we don’t show composure in pressure moments, we deserve to be where we are in the table,” Kohli said at the post-match presentation. There’s no rocket science behind it. We haven’t played the kind of cricket we should be playing at the level of the IPL and if you bowl like that, with not enough bravery in the crunch moments, then it’s always going to be difficult when you have power-hitters like [Andre] Russell in the opposition.I think we needed to be more clinical in the last four overs. That was just one-dimensional in the end and nothing came off. We cracked a little under pressure and that’s been the story of the season.” Well the way Russell has been playing this season, it wasn’t a surprise he batted, the surprise was the way Kohli handled his bowlers, the pitch was gripping and the ball was turning and Kohli had 12 overs of spin but he only managed to bowl 7 overs of them and he decided to give the penultimate over to Moh. Siraj who wasn’t bowling well.
Kohli further said, “”I wasn’t really happy getting out that moment [in the 18th over],” he said. “[We] could have added 20-25 more had we gone on. And then AB [de Villiers] didn’t get much strike in the end as well. He lost a bit of momentum too. In hindsight they [scores] are never good, but if you can’t defend 75 in four overs then you don’t know how many are enough. You can’t have 100 in the last over to defend. You have to look at things in hindsight but I thought the runs were enough on the board. If you saw the ball, the way it spun and stuck in the wicket, it wasn’t that easy. But we just didn’t have composure.””We have a bit of a chat about what went wrong and what happened in the game,” he said of the immediate response to the loss. “But apart from that there’s not much to say.
You can talk as much as you want but you’ve got to go on the field and actually do the job. [I don’t think] talking enough helps all the time, you just need to give the guys a little bit of space, try to come back stronger in the next game, try to get on a roll on a winning note. It’s been a difficult season for us so far but we’re still optimistic about our chances and we just have to believe that we can turn things around.” Now it remains to be seen if RCB could actually turn things around.
