An injury to Chennai Super Kings captain MS Dhoni presented Rashid Khan and Sunrisers Hyderabad with a weakened batting unit to attack, and on cue the Afghanistan spinner turned up with the goods to strangle the visitors. CSK coach Stephen Fleming was very categorical in his analysis of the game saying that his side did not bat well while Hyderabad bowled well which caused them to fall short while posting a target.
“The performance was a bit stop-start. We started well with the bat, till about 10 overs and after that we got a bit strangled. We kept losing quick wickets and fell short. Hyderabad bowled very well and we didn’t bat well,” Fleming told the media in the post-match press conference.
“What we didn’t do today was respect the little things, the batting was inconsistent and when we started with the ball, we were intimidated and inconsistent.”
Led by Suresh Raina on the day, CSK could manage only 132 in their quota of 20 overs, which was comfortably tackled by the blistering start provided by David Warner and Jonny Bairstow before Imran Tahir and Karn Sharma engineered a mini-collapse to stall the inevitable.
“The problem was we didn’t have enough runs to defend. What we wanted to do is put pressure on their middle order and that would mean ideally get a score of around 170… Another 30 odd runs on that wicket would have been a good contest.”
“We don’t over analyse our defeats. We identify the areas to work on and we work on those. You have to have some kind of resilience. We played eight and won seven and the ninth one we got to keep motivated. This is the first time in a while we were exposed like that and will be interesting to see how the players respond. It will be business as usual tomorrow and nothing will change except for us focusing more on the things we should have done better.
