IPL 2024: RCB director Bobat hopes for a turnaround

Bengaluru: With just one win from six matches and nothing working for them, Royal Challengers Bengaluru are stuck at the bottom of the barrel. With superstar players misfiring, hopes of climbing up also look bleak given how thick and fast matches come in the IPL with barely any recovery time. 

Mo Bobat, RCB’s Director of Cricket, did appear concerned at Sunday’s press conference here at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium but chose to look the at bright side, saying one win can spark a turnaround.

Excerpts…

On RCB’s strategy going forward: We need to start winning some games. That's the strategy. We're obviously getting close to the halfway point of the competition and there's no hiding away from the fact that we haven't played the way we want to play. When you go into the competition, you work out what you think your best chances of winning are. We haven't played the way we want to play.  If we can start by getting a win in the next game (against Sunrisers Hyderabad), which is all you can think about is the game in front of you, you hope you can start to build some momentum. But in competitions like this, negative momentum can build up quickly. And you want to try and switch that to get some positive momentum.

On Maxwell’s poor form: Firstly, he's disappointed. He obviously has high standards and he has had a very impressive 12 to 24 months. And he's in our planning, a really important part of our batting line-up. He’s an important part of our batting line-up, particularly those middle overs where we want to be able to attack with him. We're trying to target that middle phase of the game, where we feel like we could probably score at a better rate or put more pressure on the opposition. So we're trying to work with him to do that.

On Kohli’s strike rate and team’s cautious batting: The point on Virat (strike rate) seems to get a lot of media and air time in India. Among all the openers that have played in the competition this season, he’s scored more runs than most of them. He’s also offering a decent strike rate. I’m not spending too much time worrying about Virat’s batting, he’s doing really well. I think more generally we would like to get more out in our innings, that is fair. We have seen in the competition some big scores, 200 has been breached plenty of times. It’s a bit of chicken and egg scenario where confidence will breed slightly more risk taking. We are not feeling that confident right now. 

On RCB’s average home form: Winning at home is quite tricky. It's a sort of ground, because of it's small boundaries, it's a bit more of a leveller and it's quite hard to get home advantage compared to a bigger ground or if there's conditions that tilt one way or the other, you can try and assign your team to maximise those conditions. It's a hard thing for us to do. I think from our perspective what we've tried to do is try to have pitches that have pace and bounce on them, hopefully, because we have seam bowling heavy and we have top-order batters that are really good against pace bowling. But the simple answer is that it's not that easy to gain home advantage at the Chinnaswamy because it's a small ground, it's a good leveller, it's the sort of place where everybody fancies having a go at a big score and if you get on the wrong side of the toss, it can be difficult to defend. So it's not an easy place but we've got to be prepared for that challenge.