Rajasthan Royals skipper Sanju Samson was disappointed after their 10-run loss against Lucknow Super Giants at the Sawai Man Singh Stadium, Jaipur on Wednesday. Samson feels the target of 155 runs was chaseable with the kind of batting line-up they have.
In fact, RR openers – Yashasvi Jaiswal and Jos Buttler – added 87 runs for the opening alliance but failed to run away with the match. Between overs 12 and 17, RR could only manage 32 runs and lost four wickets and thus the required run rate climbed up.
It was a slowish and two-paced pitch and the RR batters could not get a move on. Yashasvi Jaiswal top-scored with 44 runs but Jos Buttler scored 40 runs at less than run-a-ball.
LSG bowlers kept striking at regular intervals to put the home team under pressure and eventually, the hosts fell 10 runs short. Devdutt Padikkal (25 off 21) and Riyan Parag (15 off 12) could not add the finishing touches for RR.
Sanju Samson said in the post-match presentation, “Not that great (feeling) after a loss, but it’s okay. We’d have loved to win the first game at Jaipur. We’ll definitely take lessons and move on. With the batting line-up we have, it was a very chaseable score. But they bowled really well, and used the conditions really well. (Conditions) Personally, I was expecting something like this, bit of slow and low kind of wicket is what I expected and we got that. You need to play some smart cricket and we did that till the ninth over. Right after Jaiswal got out, it was a matter of getting that one big partnership.”
He added, “They bowled really well, whenever we tried to go hard at them, I think we lost wickets. 5 overs 50 in this kind of wicket is a bit tough with the way they were bowling. Even if you win or lose a game, you take lessons out of it, that’s the beauty of this game. We’ll be taking lot of lessons out of it. We did a reasonably good job to restrict them to 150. There are lots of lessons in the bowling side as well and in the batting also. We expect a much better performance and we all know the standard of cricket we’ve been playing. We have to move forward and play some better cricket.”
RR would have been disappointed as they could not get the job done in the run-chase after coming up with a good bowling performance. Rajasthan Royals will next take Royal Challengers Bangalore on Sunday at the M.Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru.
