Faf du Plessis agrees ‘Virat Kohli struggled to hit the ball’ in RCB vs KKR IPL 2024 match but…

Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s Virat Kohli, right, stands between the wickets with captain Faf du Plessis

Faf du Plessis called the Royal Challengers Bengaluru vs Kolkata Knight Riders IPL 2024 match ‘strange’. It kind of was. It was a game of two halves. When RCB batted, the pitch appeared to be a bit two-paced. When the KKR bowlers, especially Andre Russell, rolled his fingers over the ball and hit the right areas, it was difficult for the RCB batters to hit the big shots, especially towards the back end of the innings. But when KKR came out to bat, the tables turned. The ball came onto the bat much better and they reached the 183-run target in just 16.5 overs.

Did the pitch change this drastically? It may have come on to the bat slightly better without a doubt. Even KKR’s Venkatesh Iyer, who smashed 50 off 30 balls, agreed. “One side definitely became better to bat and that’s why we targetted bowlers from that end,” he said. But RCB’s another drubbing in the hands of KKR cannot be blamed on the nature of the 22 yards alone.

For starters, should they have gotten more runs? Definitely! Especially considering one of their openers Virat Kohli, batted through the 20 overs. What was Kohli’s score after staying there for 20 overs? 83* off 59 balls. He faced half of RCB’s entire innings for just 83 runs. That’s just 8.3 runs an over. There is a school of thought that will say the top-scorer of the match cannot be a reason for the team’s loss. True. He was not the reason but his approach needs to change.

Kohli had the lowest strike rate among all RCB batters to have crossed double digits on Friday against KKR. Sure, he has a role in the team but if he is batting through the innings then a strike rate of 140 in the current times, is unlikely to win games.

The KKR bowlers were good. They sussed the conditions much better than their RCB counterparts. Their slower ball percentage in the last 10 overs was 1.5 times than RCB’s. This made Kohli’s job difficult. But still, it was a strange Kohli innings. Generally, the problem is mostly with his starts in T20s. He gathers momentum and catches up as his innings progresses. On most days, he is unstoppable in the death overs.

But not on Friday. He faced 16 balls (more than half) in the last five overs of the RCB innings and hit just two boundaries – one six and a four.

“Strange one, first innings we thought that the wicket was very two-paced, you could see that when the guys bowled the cutters, back of a length, the guys really struggled. We thought it was a decent score knowing that it gets a little bit easier in the evening, there was a little bit of dew that came in. Looking at the way we batted in the first innings, even if you have someone in there, Virat was struggling to hit the ball just because there was lack of pace and the two-paceness,” du Plessis said after the match acknowledging that it was a struggle for his best batter.

‘Couldn’t bowl a spinner to Sunil Narine’: Du Plessis

What did KKR do in their chase? They approached it like a 100-metre sprint instead of a marathon and got off to a flier with Sunil Narine and Phill Salt hitting boundaries at will. Du Plessis said it was a challenge for him as bowling spin to Narine was not a high-percentage option.

“You can always know after the game, we can say perhaps try one or two things but the way the two of them (Narine and Slat) were striking the ball, some really good batting there, they put pressure on our bowlers. They hit strong cricket shots and pretty much took the game away. With Narine there, you can’t really go to spin, you want to use pace upfront. That’s also a really good match-up for Salt and the way he plays. They were excellent, really broke the game in the first six overs,” he said.

RCB have now lost two of their first three matches and sit at No.6 in the points table.

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