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“It is hard to pick yourself up. You have had a rough season,” Steyn said. “You almost feel like by the 16th, 17th over – at least 18th over – the game is yours. You know, a little bit of smart cricket… you bowl three balls, three extra balls to Avesh [Khan, Choudhary’s partner], and the game is done. That’s where it is right there. But those extra deliveries go to Mukul. He hits them for boundaries. And that’s your season pretty much.”
“Rinku [Singh, 4 in seven balls], on the other hand, he just looked totally out of sorts. It was almost like he wasn’t watching the ball as closely as what he could have. He’s looking to play the shot, but all his weight is going away from the ball. It was really unusual, which is something that I haven’t seen from him before. There was a batting line-up that looked short on confidence in that middle order.”
Steyn was similarly unhappy about Green’s approach. Green has been under pressure, returning low scores with the bat, and not bowling – though that changed against LSG – after coming into the KKR set-up for a record auction bid.
“Cameron Green, I’m thinking Digvesh [Rathi] bowling to him and he’s literally just blocking it back,” Steyn said. “And I’m listening to the commentators say, ‘he’s waiting for his match-up’. But who? You’ve got to take guys on. Who’s the match-up? He’s just patting balls back. In a period where you feel, even if you face ten balls or 12 balls, you should be in now. You should be really going. It doesn’t fill me with confidence watching that.”
Powell suggested that the score on the board had given KKR hope of winning the game, which the loss of seven LSG wickets by the 16th over had fuelled. Then things started going wrong. Green was handed the 19th over despite Kartik Tyagi and Navdeep Saini having an over each left. Vaibhav Arora had an over remaining too, but he was slotted for the final over. Green, though, ended up conceding 16 runs.
“A lot of the times you’re under the pump where you have to bring your best bowlers a little bit earlier than the 19th over, so that when it reached the 19th over you give yourself a chance,” Powell said in the press conference. “I think that is what happened with us tonight.
“We try as a bowling group, we realise that if we bowl the ball in the wicket, it’s a good option, and he keep hitting those balls. Maybe a little bit earlier we could have gone a little bit wider. But it’s us sitting here looking back talking in hindsight and I’m not one that talks in hindsight. When you’re out there and the pressure is on, and guys keep telling you or you have a plan to do one thing, it then comes down to execution.
“I think they could have gone to a wide plan just as we went for the last ball, the last over. We could have gone to a wide plan after we realised that he [Choudhary]’s hitting those short deliveries. We could have gone to a wide plan maybe a few balls earlier to see how best we could get a few dot balls in.”
