‘We have ourselves to blame’

Mohali: Kings XI Punjab skipper Kumar Sangakkara offered no excuses for yet another loss at home in DLF IPL 2010 in his interaction with the media.

On the loss

I thought we gave too many runs at the death but Manoj Tiwary batted really well and I thought we got off to a sound start even though we lost a couple of wickets. But I think the in the middle overs when Mahela [Jayawardene] and I were batting and I couldn’t really get on with the game and really get the boundaries as we wanted and I think that is where we lost momentum.

On Yuvraj Singh opening the batting

We were thinking about where we could fit in Yuvi very well and with the field up in the first six overs, with his hitting, he could take us off to a great start and also score a lot of runs for himself. That was the plan before the game.

On whether the team is experiencing problems

I don’t think there is anything like that. The guys are really training hard, really wanting to perform out there. But we seem to be falling short in one area or the other in every game. [In] this one, I thought, we were comprehensively beaten but the others were all quite close games - we were in it until the very last overs. But today it was just a case of us in the middle not really handling the pressure well.

On the bowlers giving away too many runs

The first over, I thought, Brett [Lee] was very unlucky to go for runs - there were quite a few edges that went to the boundary. Unfortunately, that’s the way it goes, you’ve got to accept that. But on a ground like this you have to back yourself to chase 180. I thought Irfan [Pathan] and all the other bowlers bowled as well as they could, but again I thought 180 is a very chase-able score on this track.

On KXIP’s chances of reaching the semi-finals

Well we have got to win seven out of eight if we want to even have a chance, so that’s not an impossible task, its very difficult. But we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves because we put ourselves in this position.

On the team not responding to his style of captaincy

Well I think they are responding as well as they can. You know we need a collective effort and it really doesn’t mean that I make brilliant decisions every single match and they don’t step up, no. We make decisions according to plans we have, we expect everyone to execute them and they do their hardest. And I think today, especially after the start they had in the first six overs, we really managed to pull it back. But again the batsmen really tried to clear the field at certain stages of the game, they [KKR] managed to do that better than us.