Gujarat Lions assistant coach Shitanshu Kotak admits the middle order should have batted better on a pitch that wasn’t turning a great deal. Kotak also added that the loss of the top order early was what cost them the game in their chase of 155 against the Kings XI Punjab.
After the bowlers did well to restrict Murali Vijay’s side to 154, Lions lost Brendon McCullum early and Dwayne Smith and Suresh Raina failed to get going. After partnerships of 47,112 and 93 in their last three matches, Smith and McCullum failed to fire and Kotak was quick to not point the blame at them.
“The way the openers have played so far has been brilliant, apart from today," Kotak said. "They take chances and it has been successful so far. Today was one off day where it didn't work. I wouldn't complain much about it. But with a score of around 150, the middle order could have played better and got it.”
Regarding the nature of the wicket, Kotak said “I don’t think the ball was spinning at all. Maybe a bit slow, but I wouldn't complain about the wicket. If you look at the wicket, there were no marks and a bit of grass cover on the wicket. To chase 150 on this wicket, nine out of ten times we would have done that.”
Instead he focussed on the wickets that fell to spin, including Axar Patel’s hat-trick on a pitch that didn’t offer too much assistance to the spinners. Although the victorious Kings XI skipper Vijay said the ball stopped a bit while spinners were bowling from the pavilion end, Kotak wasn’t blaming the wickets on the nature of the pitch.
"I think the two bowled dismissals [Dwayne Bravo and Dinesh Karthik], and the third where the left-hander [Ravindra Jadeja] got caught behind… they all went straight. So I don't think it had anything to do with spin at all,” he added.
Although Lions had won six of the seven IPL matches before the game against Kings XI, Kotak admitted that their winning run had made it easy for them to address issues like their weak middle-order.
"When we win, it makes it lot easier for the coaches to criticise," Kotak said. "When you lose, you don't want to criticise players because they won't like it. You always try and cover most of the areas, and when you are winning, it is a lot easier to look at those areas.
"Today's game was something completely different. Definitely we think about the things that went wrong in the last few matches. Even today, we were winning. For most of the match, the game was under our control. We do think about things that we haven't done well.”
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