Watson praises Kohli for utilising him well
Dec 22, 2018 at 5:18 PM
Royal Challengers Bangalore(RCB) all-rounder Shane Watson once again showed why he is the costliest player of this season.Shane Watson bowled a superb quota of four overs to help his team clinch a thriller against Kings XI Punjab.
Watson’s spell of 2 for 22 in his four overs helped Royal Challengers defend 175 by one run.The all-rounder gave away only 10 runs in his final two overs to make the chase tough for Punjab.
After dismissing Amla in the first over, he was once again handed the ball by Kohli in the seventeenth over when Punjab needed 40 from 24 balls. Watson conceded only three runs and took the crucial wicket of Murali Vijay who was playing brilliantly. In the nineteenth over, Watson conceded only seven runs and left Kings XI with 17 to get off the last over.
Watson, who scored only 1 when batting, said that his dismissal gave him the ideas as how to bowl on that pitch.
“The plan changes from batter to batter, and from ball to ball. Knowing how the wicket was tonight, it was quite slow, so I changed pace because it was gripping a little bit,” Watson told iplt20.com. “So I bowled a lot more of those cutters than the normal sort of speed balls. So that was really the plan – I realised that soon after I got out the way I did earlier in the evening – to keep bowling the variation deliveries. I knew the cutters were going to be very effective tonight and it’s fortunate that most of the time it did.”
Watson, who is now the joint leading wicket taker in this IPL with Andre Russell and Mitchell McClenaghan- with 14 wickets in 9 matches, praised his skipper Kohli for utilising him really well.
“Virat has been using me in one-over spells early on in the innings and then more towards the back end, depending on where it suits the team the most,” he said. “I am happy to bowl anywhere Virat (needs me). He instills a lot of confidence in me, he lets me sort of choose the balls and allows me to set my fields accordingly – with his input a lot of the time as well. It’s been great to work with him and he’s using me very nicely.”
After a slow start to this season, RCB has now won two games in a row and Watson hoped they could carry this momentum forward to qualify for the knockouts.
“It is a gift to be able to win a game by one run. In these tournaments, in the IPL, you have to fall on the right side of those really close ones to be able to give yourself a chance to make it to the playoffs. So it’s a good starting point we were able to fall on the right side of the game tonight to continue the momentum that we started in the last game in Bangalore.”