By Jacques Kallis
Some defeats hurt more than others and Mon
day’s loss to the Superkings was disappointing for two reasons. It removed us from the top two places – and it came off the last ball of the match. That’s never a good feeling!
However, we still have our destiny in our own hands and if we can beat the Mumbai Indians on their home turf then we should be back in those top two coveted places.
There is a significant advantage to finishing in the top two because you have two chances of reaching the final rather than just a straight semi-final knockout. We have occupied one of those places for most of the last two weeks so it’s frustrating to see us lying third now.
All we can do is get straight back to winning ways and hope that’s enough to move back up a place. But if we finish third or fourth and have to win two games to get to the finals, I still back us to do exactly that.
It is crazy for any team to expect an easy ride to the final – the spread of talent amongst the Franchises is just too even for any team to establish dominance over 16 matches.
The Daredevils have had a great campaign but even they could lose two games in the play-offs and fail to reach the final. Any team can beat any other on any given day, that’s just a fact.
There is a clear understanding in the KKR squad that any player can have a bad day. Sometimes a ‘bad day’ can mean just one bad over, or even a couple of expensive deliveries! Sometimes a bad day can mean the failure to hit a single ball to the boundary. That’s the nature of the game. It’s unforgiving and ruthless.
The Indians have a strong South African flavour with two men I played all of my career with in Herschelle Gibbs and Shaun Pollock. I can’t believe Polly and I started our international careers together – and now he’s an old-man coach! It’s taken a while for Hersch to regain his fitness and start playing but, by all accounts, he’s looking as sharp as ever.
And then there’s Sachin, older than all of us and still going strong. Although the intensity of T20 exceeds all other formats, the length of the game allows us ‘mature’ cricketers to recover more quickly from the aches and pains that everyone experiences. I think it was two years ago that I said, in this column, that T20 would extend players careers rather than shorten them.
Every IPL Season has been long but this one has been my most enjoyable and my competitive instincts are burning bright. Like all the KKR squad, I’m desperately excited about our chances now that we have reached the business end of the tournament. I trust everybody who has read my column will know how much I want an IPL winners’ medal on my bar at home. It would take pride of place.