Rising Pune Supergiant batsman Manoj Tiwary described his 27-run cameo as one of the turning points of his side’s IPL match against Royal Challengers Bangalore in Bengaluru and expressed happiness at the role he played in the win.
Tiwary struck 27 from just 11 balls after RPS suffered a middle order collapse to take the team score to 161 for 8. RPS then restricted RCB to 134 for 9 to notch up a 27-run win.
“There were lot of turning points. My innings at the end was important, that made 20-odd runs difference. Obviously we had a collapse in the middle order. We lost the momentum from there, Tiwary said.
“It was not easy for batsman to rotate the strike. Obviously my innings proved important to the team and also the contributions of others. It was a team effort,” he told reporters after the match.
Tiwary said he was not surprised with his side’s 161/8 after being sent into bat because he knew the wicket was very difficult to play on. He said the bowlers did a fantastic job to restrict RCB to 134 for nine.
“To be honest, I am not surprised because the amount of runs we put on was just enough. Rest was left for the bowlers to execute, and they executed the plan very well by bowling a lot of slow deliveries and slow cutters,” he said.
Tiwary said reading bowlers’ mind was very important for him in the last phase of his side’s innings.
He said before coming into this IPL season, he had made up his mind to build innings and go for aggressive strokes at the same time to have good strike rate, which is very important for a batsman in shorter versions of the game.
“Strike rate is obviously at the back of my mind. In domestic matches, I had a very high strike rate because it is the demand of this format. Before I came here, I had a plan to build my innings if the situation demanded and be aggressive at the same time,” he said.
On Ben Stokes and Shardul Thakur, Tiwary said both bowled exceptionally well because it is not easy to bowl to Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers and others.
Asked how much pressure was on him to make a comeback in IPL, Tiwary said there were a lot of expectations from people to score 1,000 runs at the start of every season, but even after scoring 700 runs, the performance was not appreciated enough.
“For me, every season is important. Somehow there are lot of expectations. People want me to do well. They want me to score 1000 runs every season but people should understand even getting 700-odd runs also is good enough. I have decided no matter what people say, I will not get bogged down by them,” he said.
Vettori defends dropping Gayle
Royal Challengers Bangalore head coach Daniel Vettori has defended the dropping of Chris Gayle to bring in Shane Watson in his side’s IPL match against Rising Pune Supergiant, saying he felt his team was a bowler short in the earlier matches.
“After the Mumbai Indians game, we thought we had a bowler short and Watson gives us the opportunity as he is a proven performer with both bat and ball. He has been a wonderful Twenty20 all-rounder and we decided to back Watson for his all-round skills,” Vettori said after RCB lost to RPS.
Watson failed miserably both with the bat and ball. He conceded 44 runs in his four overs and made 14 while batting as he fell to Ben Stokes at a crucial stage of the match.
Vettori said conceding far too many runs in the final couple of overs after bowling tightly in the earlier 18 overs brought a lot of pressure on the team.
“We bowled tightly in the first 18 overs but went away with the plan in the last two overs which cost us 30 runs. It was 15 runs too many and that put us under immense pressure,” Vettori said.
On low-scoring nature of Chinnaswamy wicket so far, Vettori said it, however, made for entertaining cricket.
“The Chinnaswamy wicket has not been a bad one for T20s. It has been exciting for the bowlers. All the matches here have been entertaining. It is different and we need to adapt.
We have not been able to mirror the performance we had against Delhi Daredevils,” Vettori said.
