On Thursday, April 3, the Kolkata Knight Riders destroyed Sunrisers Hyderabad at the Eden Gardens. The reigning champions defeated the 2024 finals by 80 runs as Ajinkya Rahane's team got the pitch they desired from Sujan Mukherjee and displayed their full strength. After poor efforts in both halves of the contest, SRH's prospects of winning the match slowly and painfully vanished in a slow turner in Kolkata. The SRH batsmen collapsed after a dreadful fielding performance that saw KKR reach 200/6 in the first innings. They only managed to score 120 runs, losing their whole team in 16.4 overs.
Pat Cummins on loss vs KKR
Pat Cummins reflected on their team's loss and said that it is not a great time for them. While talking about their batters, he said maybe they could have taken a different option. He backed their bowling but called out the fielding for the poor show on the ground.
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"Not a great time. I think this was gettable, pretty good wicket. Left too many in the field and then fell well short in the end. We need to be realistic, three games in a row it hasn’t come off for us. We need to maybe look back at whether we could have chosen better options. Our batters are best when they take the game on, but looking back maybe we could have taken different options. (On what went wrong) It was mainly our fielding, overall bowling wasn’t bad. We should have taken a few catches and stopped them a bit earlier," said Pat Cummins in the post-match presentation.
"(On Adam Zampa not playing) We only bowled 3 overs of spin, the ball wasn’t gripping for us too. So opted to go without him. (On how he will deal with this loss) I will probably address it on whether we could have used different options, but don’t want to dwell too much on it. We go back to a venue we know so well now," he added.
Cummins and SRH plummet to the bottom early on, but KKR triumphantly recovers from their crushing defeat at the hands of the Mumbai Indians. In terms of runs, the 80-run loss was the most in SRH's IPL history. As they get ready for their third home game against the Lucknow Super Giants on April 8, the Ajinkya Rahane team would be thrilled with the outcome.