RCB captain Faf du Plessis regrets the very average batting by his team after their big 81-run loss to Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) on April 6 at Eden Gardens in the ongoing IPL 2023.
KKR batted first and posted 204/7 with Shardul Thakur top-scoring with 68 and Rahmanullah Gurbaz making 57 and Rinku Singh contributing 46 runs. While the RCB batting order looks intimidating, they completely collapsed against the KKR spinners.
Sunil Narine and debutant Suyash Sharma took two wickets each, while Varun Chakravarthy picked 4/15, as RCB only managed 123 in 17.4 overs with Virat Kohli making 21 and skipper Faf du Plessis making 23 runs.
Talking about the loss in the post-match presentation, Faf du Plessis said: "It was still a good wicket, our batting was very average and even when we lose games like these we need to ensure that we get close to the target, at least around 160 tonight. The game of T20 cricket moves so fast, we will try and learn our lessons, just making sure we tweak things we work on. It's fair to say tonight, it got a little bit away from us, tactically we could have been a little better. Death bowling is never the easiest jobs to do, Siraj and Harshal are quality bowlers at the death and just need to make sure, we work on our plans a little bit.”
Faf was all praises for Shardul Thakur, who made 68 runs in 29 balls and put on 103 runs with Rinku Singh for the 6th wicket.
"We had set it up nicely with the ball, probably at 100/5 around 13 overs, we kind of gave away 20-25 runs extra on that wicket. Shardul played incredibly well, he took the game away from us and KKR's leg-spinners bowled brilliantly. They got on top of us, with Narine and Chakaravarthy, they put the squeeze on us really well. Because that's the nature of leg spinners or mystery spinners," Faf Du Plessis continued.
RCB will be keen to regain their winning form against Lucknow Super Giants on Monday at M Chinnaswamy Stadium.
(ANI inputs)
