Ryan Harris: Kings XI's bowling plans were 'a long way off'

Kings XI Punjab's bowling coach Ryan Harris makes no secret of his disappointment with the bowling after his team's eight-wicket loss to Royal Challengers Bangalore.

Published : Apr 14, 2019 15:00 IST , Mohali

Kings XI Punjab struggled to contain Royal Challengers Bangalore's top order in its defence of 173.
Kings XI Punjab struggled to contain Royal Challengers Bangalore's top order in its defence of 173.
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Kings XI Punjab struggled to contain Royal Challengers Bangalore's top order in its defence of 173.

Showing after-effect of being brutalised by Kieron Pollard at the Wankhede Stadium, the softened-up Kings XI Punjab bowlers were far from tough in dealing with the combined might of Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers here on Saturday night.

Punjab’s bowling coach Ryan Harris made no secret of his disappointment with the bowling after Punjab's eight-wicket loss to Royal Challengers Bangalore. “We’ve had a couple of really good games which I saw as an improvement and then we saw the game out there [on Saturday], where plans that we made were a long way off. So we got to get ourselves back together quickly. We can’t afford to lose many more.”

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He also pointed to the loss of quick wickets in the middle overs as the reason for the team not reaching an imposing total in spite of Chris Gayle’s unbeaten 99.

“We got ourselves into a good position [from] where we could launch but we didn't. We lost a lot of wickets as well during the middle, that doesn't really help as it stops the run rate.”

Bangalore’s Marcus Stoinis, formerly with Punjab and familiar with this ground, highlighted the importance of taking two runs, instead of waiting to send the ball past the boundary. “We (AB de Villiers and Stoinis) were just talking that it doesn’t need to be boundaries. Make sure we run hard when we hit it to the sweepers on the boundary. When we did hit a couple of boundaries, all the fielders went right on to the fence and they are long boundaries out there. So we knew that when we didn’t hit it out of the middle [of the bat] we still had an option to take two.”

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