Mumbai, May 9: Delhi Capitals head coach Ricky Ponting has admitted that his team’s massive 91-run loss to Chennai Super Kings at DY Patil Stadium on Sunday will greatly affect their net run rate with the race to the playoffs at IPL 2022 warming up.
Chasing 208, Delhi was eliminated by just 117, hitting its sixth loss of the current season.
“Our bowling wasn’t up to par, similarly our hitting was very, very poor. There weren’t a lot of positives to take from the game. Losing by 91 runs, it’s going to make a big dent in our net run rate. It means we need to bounce back really strong in our next game,” Ponting said at the post-match virtual news conference.
But Ponting insisted that Delhi can still make the playoffs if they win the remaining three games at the league stage. “We would think we can make the play-offs with three wins. Eight wins might be enough to get us in and a big win might help our net run rate. Who knows, we might be in the finals. That’s what we can think. of, what happened has happened and we would like to look to the future and look for a rebound from a bad performance”. On the morning of the match against Chennai, Delhi had a Covid-19 scare when a net shooter tested positive for the virus. But Ponting believes the Covid-19 scare in the camp cannot be an excuse to be overtaken by Chennai.
“That’s not an excuse for us. It’s not the first time we have had to deal with it on game day. In one of the previous games against Punjab Kings we had to deal with the same thing and we ended up winning that game really comfortably.
“At Delhi Capitals, we are not going to make excuses and we are going to find solutions for the problems we are facing. Although it was not an ideal preparation, we should have played better cricket. At the end of the day, we let ourselves down,” he said.
Ponting also lent his support to captain Rishabh Pant’s decision-making, saying it’s easy for outsiders to judge a skipper’s calls on the pitch. “I fully support every decision he makes on the pitch. Being a T20 captain before, I know you don’t have a lot of time to think, especially under extreme pressure. It’s easy to make judgments from the outside, but trust me when they’re in the middle, it’s not something easy to do.” “A captain makes decisions in a very short time and believes that the decision he makes is the best one for the team at that given point in the game. He takes into account things like the size of the boundaries and the batsmen in the crease when he makes those decisions. “Delhi’s next match in IPL 2022 will be against Rajasthan Royals at DY Patil Stadium on Wednesday.
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— The story has been published from a cable source with no changes to the text.