KKR used the conditions better

Well we’ve made life a little difficult for ourselves after that defeat to Kolkata, and that means both today’s clash against Kings XI Punjab and our final game against Chennai Super Kings are must-win encounters.

It’s a situation we would have preferred to avoid, especially since it has evoked bitter memories of what happened last year when we narrowly missed out on the playoffs.

But, I suppose, if there’s a bright side to it all, we will be playing both our remaining games at home where we’ve had great success this season.

I do hope that by the time you read this, Mumbai Indians would have beaten Sunrisers Hyderabad, which would certainly help our cause.

While we believe that if we do go on to beat Punjab and Chennai, it should hopefully be enough for us to stretch our campaign into the deciding week, we sure could do with Sunrisers Hyderabad having a hiccup or two.

Ideally it would have been great to have our fate entirely in our own hands, but the Kolkata result means we will now have to keep tabs on what’s happening around us.

I’m sure our fans must be wondering what went wrong against the Knight Riders, and with good reason too, considering it was our worst batting performance of this campaign.

The truth is we simply struggled to adapt to the nature of the wicket which was pretty slow and had uneven bounce, which largely contributed to the game being a low-scoring affair.

That’s not to take anything away from the Kolkata bowlers who deserve every bit of credit for making much better use of the conditions than us.

It appears when Chris Gayle doesn’t achieve a strike rate above 100, as was the case against Kolkata, it leaves people asking how?

I’m human

I’m human, guys, these things happen. I certainly don’t go into a match with the aim of achieving a minimum strike rate of 100. You play according to the situation and conditions you come up against.

As I’ve said, these were not conditions tailor-made for batting, and we had lost a couple of wickets at crucial intervals, so I was required to adapt to the situation.

Of course, as an opener, you always want to give your side a good start, but as the Kolkata game showed, that’s not always possible.