Rajasthan Royals’ captain Smith rues another batting failure

Hyderabad: Rajasthan Royals’ campaign in the Indian Premier League so far has been a strange one. Having started confidently with two back-to-back wins, their fortunes slipped in no time. On Friday, they suffered their fourth successive defeat, going down to in-form Delhi Capitals by 46 runs to slide to seventh place in the points table.

Their batting unit, led by Smith and Sanju Samson, was firing in the first two matches. However, these batters are awfully out of form even before the tournament reached the half-way stage.

Royals’ captain Smith was disappointed the way they went about the chase and blamed losing wickets at regular intervals. Chasing 185, the lowest total on Sharjah wicket, RR were all out for 138 runs. “During the chase, we lost wickets again, I got out, we just kept on losing wickets at regular intervals, and chasing 180 odd on a wicket that has slowed up is not easy. We needed to string together partnerships but we were not able to do that,” said Smith after the loss.

He also conceded that they let the opposition off the hook while bowling. “I think the wicket did slow down a bit, probably it was not that good as it was in our first two games, but having said that, we probably let them off the hook in the first innings, we probably let them get 10-15 too many,” added the Australian.

On asked about what are the areas that he is worried about, he said, “There are plenty of areas that we need to work on, our batting has not been good enough, our top-three have not scored big runs in the last three games and that has been disappointing. There is some execution stuff with the ball as well, it is not an easy game, after all, we are doing something wrong and that is hurting us,” Smith said.

Meanwhile Capitals’ Harshal Patel said they knew their total was very much defendable on the wicket. “When Hetmyer and I were batting, we were thinking to score somewhere around 165-170 because this was a considerably slower wicket than we had played on earlier. The ball was definitely stopping, this Sharjah wicket was considerably different so a total around 170 was competitive,” said Patel.

“We bat pretty deep, we have Axar at eight and Ashwin at nine, and Rabada can hit a few sixes as well we have a deep batting lineup, anytime after the 16th over, it is about hitting one-two boundaries every over,” he added.