Shillong, April 9: Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) captain, Shreyas Iyer, acknowledged his team’s inability to adapt quickly to the changing conditions in the powerplay after Chennai Super Kings defeated KKR by seven wickets on Monday at MA Chidambaram Stadium.
Despite a strong start, KKR struggled to capitalise and lost wickets in succession, unable to gauge the tricky pitch effectively. CSK’s victory was orchestrated by their spinners, particularly Ravindra Jadeja, whose 3 for 18 helped stifle KKR’s batting lineup.
Ruturaj Gaikwad emerged as the hero for CSK in the chase, anchoring the innings with an unbeaten 67.
“I personally feel we fell short in terms of assessing the wicket,” Iyer said after the match. “We were phenomenal in the powerplay but after that, we couldn’t capitalise, we lost consecutive wickets. We weren’t able to assess the conditions as quickly as possible. It completely changed after the powerplay and scoring runs off this wicket wasn’t easy.
“Obviously, they know conditions pretty well and they bowled according to their plan. It was a bit tacky, especially even when the hard-hitters came in, it wasn’t easy for them to go [big] right from the first ball. It changed tremendously after the powerplay. We were trying to construct our innings, didn’t go to plan. We take those learnings and move forward.”
After leaking 56 runs in the powerplay, Jadeja pulled back the things for CSK and then with contributions from Maheesh Theekshana and Tushar Deshpande and Mustafizur Rahman CSK bowler spun a web around the KKR batsmen, restricting them to a below-par total of 137 for 9.
“We were in a comfortable place at the beginning, we thought 160-170 would be a great score on this wicket. Even when they played against RCB, the conditions were fairly similar. So that was our plan but when you lose consecutive wickets, it’s difficult to carry forward momentum,” Iyer said.
With this win, CSK are placed in fourth place on the points table, while KKR are second.