JOIN USIt was heartbreak for Kings XI Punjab, the most dominant side in the league phase. Their skipper George Bailey, who otherwise sports a perpetual ear-to-ear grin, cut a despondent picture at the post-final media meet.
Excerpts:
On losing the match despite a century by Saha: I am not sure. Sometimes it’s better to lose finals by big margins, isn’t it?
The closer the margin, the more what ifs you have and things you think about that you could have done differently. But I don’t think our guys can do anything but be very proud of their performance.
Wriddhi’s (Wriddhiman Saha) innings in a lot of way summed up our tournament. He is probably a guy who is unheralded a little bit, probably underrated in a lot of circles but for us, he has just been solid as a rock.
On shaking up the batting order:
The three games prior to this against Kolkata, I think we had made 130s, 140s and 130s. And we have struggled a lot against their spin.
Our best player against spin is Glenn Maxwell, or probably Sehwag and Maxwell. So we were just trying to spread them out a little bit, force Kolkata to do something a bit different.
On Akshar Patel:
He is such an impressive package. Right from the first day, the knowledge of his own game and the awareness of his own game that he has for a 20-year-old is phenomenal.
I think I said the other night that we used him in the first couple of games, we tried to look after him and used him at times that we thought would be most beneficial to him but by the end of the tournament, he was bowling our key overs, he was our real go-to bowler. Wonderful fielder. I think he is going to have a long and very successful career.