IPL 2020 | RCB’s batting ran out of steam towards the tournament’s back end, rues Simon Katich

Coming on the back of having posted scores of 150, 164, 120 and 152, Royal Challengers Bangalore needed a strong showing from their batsmen in the Eliminator versus Sunrisers Hyderabad on Friday but what, instead, followed was an encore of the final four games of the group stages. After being put into bat, RCB lost both the openers inside the powerplay, and lost wickets at regular intervals, before being eventually rescued by AB de Villiers to a below-par score of 131. In fact, only two of their Top 8 batsmen got to double digits and the innocuous performance proved to be ‘not good enough’ against an SRH side that chased down the target with relative ease.

“That's probably the one area that faded a bit after a really good start to the tournament. Credit to the Sunrisers, they squeezed us beautifully, they took early wickets and we were always under pressure trying to play catch-up.

Ahead of the Eliminator, RCB made radical changes to the side as apart from changing three of the four overseas players that featured in their last game in the group stages against Delhi, the team also, for the first time all season, promoted skipper Kohli to open the batting. The changes, as it turned out, did not work but Katich vehemently defended the alterations. The RCB coach claimed that the chopping and changing done was minimal and stated that dip in players’ form, unfortunately, forced the management’s hand in making hard-wired changes.

"Look, it (the top order) was settled. Aaron Finch didn't get dropped until I think the 11th game. In terms of a settled combination, I think we did do that for the first 10 games. Finchy did not make the runs as he would have liked, we made the change, Josh Philippe came in, he got an opportunity but when it got back to the playoffs coming around, we made a decision that Virat was going to open today. 

IPL 2020 turned out to be yet another season where RCB promised so much and delivered so little, but despite the team’s campaign coming to a premature end, the 45-year-old head coach took positives out of performances from certain individuals, which turned out to be a silver lining. Katich reckoned that the spark shown by the likes of Padikkal, Siraj and Sundar will all hold the side in good stead heading into the future.

"There's certainly plenty of positives in the tournament. Obviously we are disappointed to get knocked out when we had a great opportunity to get moving forward. But I guess the great sign for the future is that Padikkal was magnificent at the top of the order. Certainly a tough job for a young man in his first season and he did a magnificent job. He's got all the shots, he's played some very good knocks for us setting us up some big platforms.