Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) captain David Warner said he takes "full responsibility" for not performing up to the level of expectations of him after his team suffered second defeat on the trot in the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2020.
Warner's men lost to Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) by seven wickets in Abu Dhabi this Saturday (September 26) after having earlier gone down to Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB).
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The 2016 champions managed a total of only 142/4 in 20 overs despite enjoying the best of batting conditions in the first half after winning the toss. Warner contributed a 30-ball 36 at the top and No.3 Manish Pandey (51) scored a fine half-century but the rest of the batting unit struggled.
"In the match against KKR, I and Jonny got ourselves in and we backed ourselves to play the way we wanted to play, unfortunately through the middle, we could have gone probably a little harder, we could have taken few more risks," said Warner while replying to an ANI query during a virtual press conference.
"It was a very soft and poor dismissal from myself, my dismissal happened when we were looking to change the gears, I don't blame anyone and I take full responsibility for not batting out the overs."
Wriddhiman Saha, the wicketkeeper batsman, who was batting after a long break, tried stitching together a partnership with Manish following Warner and Jonny Bairstow's dismissals. But Saha looked rusty and couldn't up the scoring-rate when he needed to, making a painstaking a 31 off 30 deliveries, which didn't help SRH's cause at all.
Warner felt they needed to be a lot more urgent through the middle-overs and produce 20-30 extra runs that would've put KKR batsmen under more pressure in the second half.
"I don't know where it wrong, we just cannot be having two batsmen on the bench, we could have gone a little bit harder through the middle, we played four-five overs for 20 runs after my dismissal, we need to apply little more pressure on the bowlers and we need to try to hit more boundaries."
"I am more disappointed with the number of dot balls we played, there were 35-36 dot balls and in T20 cricket, it is not acceptable."
"You have to put a genuine batsman, it's easy to say send a pinch-hitter, at this stage with myself getting out, we had to send one genuine batsman (Saha), KKR bowlers bowled well," the skipper added.
Warner also explained the rationale behind his decision after the flip of the coin in a tournament where all other teams have instead opted to chase so far.
"We have batted first before with dew in India, it's about putting runs on the board, in the end, we were 20-30 runs short, if we had more it probably would have been a good game."
"At the end of the day, if you don't put the right total on the board, it will be very hard. There have been instances in the past where we have defended 130 or less," he signed off.
SRH next face Delhi Capitals (DC) on Tuesday (September 29) in Abu Dhabi.
