Follow UsWhen Rajasthan Royals won four of their first five matches, they were touted as the best team in the league, with the most sorted combination to boast about. It did, however, frizzle out, with the side registering four losses in the next five games. What would haunt them the most is the way their batters, barring Yashasvi Jaiswal, have performed this season, with the likes of Sanju Samson and Jos Buttler struggling to score enough runs.
Kumar Sangakkara, RR’s director of cricket, has bemoaned the embarassing nine-wicket loss to Gujarat Titans on Friday and stated that the team failed to capitalize on the starts, showing a complete lack of intent against Gujarat’s two spinners - Noor Ahmed and Rashid Khan.
"We were very, very poor in terms of capitalizing on the starts we got. We were showing intent for a while, but we were a little bit reckless, and then we had very, very little intent against the two spinners. Rashid bowled brilliantly, I thought Noor bowled really well as well, but that's the time the batters need to step up and show more and more intent,” Sangakkara said in the post-match press conference.
"Even a defence in T20 cricket, one has to have the intent of wanting to score. You work down the sequence of 6, 4, 3, 2, 1; or, if you're under pressure, you go 4, 3, 2, 1. But you are always looking for opportunities to score, and at the minimum, get off strike. And once that intent is shown, it doesn't matter how good a bowler you are, you are always thinking that you can't give the batter anything loose because you're going to get put away. So that's one area that we've got to really look at."
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Sangakkara reserved praise for Noor Ahmed, who was taken for runs in the first-round encounter between both teams but this time, he made sure things are on an even keel. By sending Dhruv Jurel and Devdutt Padikkal back to the hut pretty early, Ahmed made his mark in the GT camp.
"The young man showed a lot of character," he said. "He didn't have the greatest in terms of his first outing against us, but since then he has bowled exceptionally well. Again, it is just how you arrange your game against… so-called mystery spinners. And if you show intent, you see that Noor, with a lack of experience, can bowl balls that are hittable but you've got to get that rhythm going off rotation of strike, putting the bad balls away and constantly reversing pressure on the bowler.
"You can't sit and wait in T20 cricket and let the bowlers bowl to us. But having said that, both Rashid and Noor bowled exceptionally well and not just that - their pace-bowling quartet came back into the game really well after not having the best of starts. So I think it's all credit to Gujarat, the way they played, and we played a very poor game."
Jos Buttler is having a not-so-ideal season, with 10 games yielding 297 runs. That he has a strike rate of 138.79 makes things even more difficult to fathom. But the Lankan legend has thrown his weight behind the English batter.
"For Jos, he had a great run last season," Sangakkara said. "He started off really well and all batters go through a cold streak and a hot streak. It doesn't reduce the quality of the player and over a longer period of time, you find with highly-skilled players that it all equalizes.
"It's the same with Hetmyer. He's been going through a rough patch after having started well again. But then that's what a team is for. Other batters have to step up the slack and keep going and when they do fire it just adds to the impetus and the totals that we score. That's just the nature of T20 cricket and the conversations have been very good. They've been fantastic in the team environment and I know that they're trying their best to do as well as they can,” Sangakkara added.