Royal Challengers Bangalore’s Director of Cricket Operations, Mike Hesson had stated that the 34 runs loss was because of the slowness of the pitch.
After analyzing RCB’s performance, who lost just two matches in the ongoing season of the Indian Premier League, the franchise director said, what caught the team off-guard was the difficulty in playing the shots the second innings.
“It was getting difficult to force the ball. I think you could stand and force the ball once but when you were trying to hit, it was getting very hard. We weren’t getting any timing on it. The harder we tried to hit, the worse it got. We needed to get one into the stands but it was very difficult,” said the former Head coach of the New Zealand cricket team.
Hesson conceded that Chris Gayle (46 off 24 balls) did upset the rhythm of his bowlers when Punjab Kings were batting. “He (Gayle) came in and put us under pressure and we probably couldn’t respond as well as we could have. Then we fought back really well (restricting PBKS to) 100 for 1 after 10 overs. But over the next 6-7 overs, we just let it slip,” Hesson averred.
“They (PBKS) probably got 15-20 more runs than would have been ideal on this sort of a wicket. Had they been restricted to 160, we would have approached the game slightly differently.”
“When we do the review, we might look at how we can operate better on these types of surfaces and how we can be a bit more proactive with the bat through the middle (overs), and get us up to speed with the game. Just try and up the ante.”
