Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) succumbed to a 62-run defeat against Gujarat Titans (GT) when the two sides met at the MCA Stadium in Pune for their Indian Premier League (IPL) fixture. Speaking after the game at the post-match press conference, skipper KL Rahul was unhappy with his team's batting performance after being dismissed for a miserly 82 runs after restricting the GT batters to just 144.
"Restricting a team under 150 is really commendable on any pitch and the bowlers did their job. We should have batted a lot better. Some poor shot selections and a runout didn't help. Some good learning from this for us hopefully," Rahul said after the loss.
Chasing a total as low as the one GT had set, Rahul believes that his team should have made more of their powerplay, "These low totals, you want to use the Powerplay. So for Quinton and me, it was about getting the team off to a good start, not necessarily getting off to a 60-run Powerplay, but at least getting to 35 or 45 without losing too many wickets would have been ideal and set us up."
He also admitted that the GT spinners were at their best on the night, but his side were not going to sit and overanalyse the match, "In the middle, we knew that their spinners will be difficult to score off, but having said that we have to find ways to score runs against good opposition on tricky pitches. That's something that we need to learn and figure out. Obviously, we're not going to sit back and overanalyse a game like this."
"What we want is energy and intensity in the field and that was quite good while we were fielding. Batting, you get one chance and you can make a mistake. So you don't want to overanalyse a game like this. You want to learn from it and see how we can do better if we're put in a situation like this again," he added.