Former Indian head coach Ravi Shastri expressed his concerns over KL Rahul’s evaluation of the pitch at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur. Lucknow Super Giants register their fourth victory against the home side Rajasthan Royals on Wednesday.
Lucknow Super Kings had a poor start to the innings as they managed to score only 37 runs from the powerplay and could not accelerate in the innings as the pitch was on the slower side, making it difficult for the batters to pick up boundaries.
Former Indian World Cup- winner Ravi Shastri, who is currently part of the Broadcasting unit of IPL 2023, was not much impressed by KL Rahul’s post-match presentation talk, as he said, they assessed 160-165 would be a competitive total on this wicket.
“Absolutely. All that talks about 160, I don’t buy it. When you have two chances, if you convert that 39 to 60 or 70, 160 becomes 175. You need someone in the top 3 to carry on and play that long inning,” Ravi Shastri told Star Sports.
LSG skipper KL Rahul had a disappointing outing with the bat, starting the innings with a maiden over of Trent Boult’s bowling and got two dropped chances inside the powerplay, but could not capitalize on his chance as he was dismissed for 39 runs off 32 balls in the 11th over.
Kyle Mayers was the top scorer for LSG with a fighting half-century against RR, While their finisher Nicholas Pooran and Marcus Stoinis showed some effort at the end of the innings to post a total of 154 runs at the end of 20 overs.
Plenty To Learn From This Game For Both Sides – Ravi Shastri
Ravi Shastri said that one of the Rajasthan Royals’ top-order batters should have played throughout the innings, which would help them to cross the line in the end, and reckons that these are early days in IPL 2023 and both the teams would learn a lot on how to approach the game from this kind of games.
“If the Rajasthan Royals team had done that. They would have won this game. Plenty to learn from this game for both sides on how to approach and take chances at the right time. It’s still early days in the tournament. Rajasthan is No. 1 and Lucknow is No. 2 and they will learn a lot from this,” he added.
Coming into the chase Rajasthan Royals made a brilliant start to the run-chase with the opening duo of Yashasvi Jaiswal (44) and Jos Buttler (40) adding 87 runs for the first wickets in 12 overs.
However, RR lost three wickets in quick succession losing Sanju Samson, Jos Buttler, and Shimron Hetmyer leaving the team in a struggling position.
With 19 runs to defend in the final, Lucknow Super Giants pacer Avesh Khan bowled exceptionally well in the final overs conceding only 8 runs and picking up the important wickets of Devdutt Padikkal and Dhruv Jurel to help his team register the fourth win in the league stage.