Delhi: Anil Kumble, captain of the Royal Challengers Bangalore, spoke to the media after their loss to the Delhi Daredevils at Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi. Here are some excerpts from the media interaction:
On the huge target of 185 putting too much pressure on the batsmen:
Pressure is always there in a 20-over game, but the toss was very important, especially on wickets like these. If a team chases, then probably a score of 150/ 160 was gettable, so 185 was too much probably on this wicket.
On what Delhi did right, especially when they were bowling:
I think the wicket plays a major role here. I mean it’s probably not the ideal Twenty20 [wicket]. You can’t always have the toss going your way. And, yeah, maybe we could have bowled better and possibly a couple of catches which fell short, maybe we could have attempted that and [this was] one of the days where things don’t go our way in the field. But, having said that, possibly we could have made a better fist of the chase.
On the change in the opening pair being one of the reasons for defeat:
No, it is not like that, we wanted to balance the side. We wanted to play Cameron White on a wicket like this and that is why we had to leave out Manish (Pandey). But, having said that, we used Cameron, who was probably in the best of form in international cricket up the order to force things, but didn’t happen today.
On the batting being unable to manage a run chase:
Yeah we certainly need to address that because of the kind of batting line-up that we have, someone like Rahul (Dravid) coming down the order, maybe we need to rethink that and use Rahul up front and possibly re-look at the way we chase because you can’t always have someone like Robin (Uthappa) or Ross Taylor bailing you out with 13, 14 runs in one over. So probably we could have made a better fist, gone hard, even if we had lost a few wickets we had the batting, but unfortunately that didn’t happen.
On IPL showcasing a lot of young cricketers:
That is always the case. You have a lot of talent coming through with eight teams and seven Indian players in every team [so we] always have a couple of young cricketers coming through, people like Mithun (Abhimanyu) today who showed a lot of character on this kind of a wicket and you had (Pradeep) Sangwan who bowled really well for Delhi, so there are few young cricketers. Vinay (Kumar) showed that he can play at this level and he is already representing India now.
On how they are looking at the coming games as they are almost through to the semi-finals:
Yeah, I think today’s victory would have certainly helped us but, having said that, we need to regroup. We are playing two home games now, the next two home games are very important so if we get through that, then I think we are more or less there. But we don’t want to look that far ahead, we know that we need to play well. I don’t think we played really well consistently throughout the 40 overs today. So we need to address that and then start playing really well if we want to go through the semi-finals and then to the final, we need to start consistently performing as a team in both the innings
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