As Royal Challengers Bengaluru crashed out of the Indian Premier League on Wednesday, its coach Andy Flower believed that going forward, the team needed to exploit some ‘particular qualities’ at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, the team’s home ground.
This season, RCB won four of its seven home games, most being high-scoring ones and for the next season, the team needs skillful bowlers specifically for the venue.
“Chinnaswamy has some particular qualities that we need to be able to exploit. You certainly need highly skillful bowlers there. Simply pace is not going to be the answer there,” Flower said.
“You need skillful, intelligent bowlers and people that can bowl to specific plans at Chinnaswamy. We have all seen how the power game has affected T20 cricket recently. On the batting front, you certainly need to recruit batters with that sort of power that can keep that sort of tempo…” he added.
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The cricketing fraternity has also been divided over the Impact Player rule, with several cricketers - including Rohit Sharma batting against it. The mid-innings substitution rule, which was introduced in the previous edition of the IPL, has sparked a row. Echoing Rohit, Virat Kohli, too, said that the rule is “disrupting the balance” of the game. However, Flower looked at the positives.
“It’s got a few positives about it, absolutely. There’s an extra Indian playing, and that’s a good thing for Indian cricket. I think it has catalyzed the batters, given them a little bit of safety net and they have taken off,” he said.
“Even if you took the Impact Player rule away, I believe the batters would still retain that very aggressive game that they are playing at the moment because they have proved to themselves that they can play aggressively. I would imagine that the broadcasters are happy with the Impact Player rule and I would imagine people watching the game have been royally entertained this year…”
However, he believes that the Indian cricket board (BCCI) should review the rule. “There has been some fascinating cricket that has played out. They will be reviewing it and that’s the right thing to do. There are some smart people that will assess the pros and cons and make decisions over the coming weeks…” he said.
Arun Dhumal, the chairman of the IPL Governing Council, told Sportstar a couple of days ago that the Board will take feedback from all the teams and the stakeholders and decide its future course of action.
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