The IPL team Kolkata Knight Riders is going to face Sunrisers Hyderabad in the finals of the tournament on 26 May as SRH managed to defeat Rajasthan Royals in the Qualifier 2 by 36 runs. The match was played yesterday at M.A. Chidambaram Stadium, Chennai and RR chose to bowl first after winning the toss.
SRH managed to put up a competitive total of 175/9 on the scoreboard with the help of useful knocks by Heinrich Klaasen (50 runs), Travis Head (34 runs) and Rahul Tripathi (37 runs). The batting lineup of RR collapsed despite getting a decent start and the whole team got out at the score of 139/7.
After the match, Tom Moody and Virender Sehwag analysed the errors made by RR and they were quite upset with the tactical error made by Sanju Samson. They questioned why Shimron Hetmyer was sent to bat after Dhruv Jurel and Ravichandran Ashwin.
Tom Moody said, “We shouldn’t be surprised because that is the trend. We shouldn’t be surprised and every single time we sit here and say that we are surprised. To me it was an absolute no-brainer. Hetmyer had to go in ahead of Dhruv Jurel, regardless of whether he played very nicely. He would have still played nice when he got his opportunity. But they needed to negate the two left-arm spinners, right at the outset. That was the hole, Sunrisers had in their attack and they needed to negate that. They should have sent Hetmyer in and said just play your game.
Take it down in your zone, let’s get ahead in this game, do not allow these left-arm spinners to take control of the game. Yes, people will see we end up getting out to left-arm spin, but the game was nearly gone by then and that was a particularly good ball, a carrom ball as we mentioned. If we got ahead in the game, that would not have ever happened. It is a tactical blunder.”
Viru paaji said, “I was surprised by their decision to bring in Hetmyer so late. They should have bought him earlier, because there were two left-arm spinners. The quicker a left-arm batters comes, it would have been better.”
RR was having a dream run in the tournament at one point of time but they had a sad ending to the tournament.
