Quality of Indian talent surprised us: Hesson

For close to 30 minutes, Mike Hesson and Simon Katich came up with myriad ways to say one thing: The Royal Challengers Bangalore bungled it.

Of course, all of what was said was consciously infused with hope and plans for a brighter future, but the team director and the head coach, respectively, spent most of their time attempting to assess and alleviate RCB’s latest failure by offering what sounded like excuses.

The season saw Virat Kohli’s men only just make it to the play-offs before crashing out in the Eliminator to Sunrisers Hyderabad on Friday night.

What was peculiar was that the Bengaluru-outfit’s plight didn’t come as a surprise to many even though they qualified for the knockouts for the first time in four seasons. Poor catching early on, consistently poor strike-rate in the middle overs and Kohli’s lost spark didn’t help them in the least.

“The strike rate wasn’t an issue in the first eight games,” Hesson reminded everyone attending the online conference on Saturday. “Once the wickets got slower, we just didn’t find a way to adapt to the conditions. We didn’t get the right balance towards the back end, and that is down to how our players were unable to adapt. We were playing on different surfaces every single day and we needed to do things differently.”

Katich wasn’t happy with their inability to adapt either, but he cited their pre-pandemic auction strategy as a possible reason for coming undone with five loses on the trot. “We picked the players with the seven games at the M Chinnaswamy stadium in mind. Once we came here, the conditions obviously changed significantly so we had to move the pieces around to try and achieve the same balance. We couldn’t,” said the former Australian batsman.

Most notably, Katich’s defence of Kohli’s 466-run season was amusing. While three fifties at an average of 42.36 over 15 games would be considered impressive for most batsmen, Kohli’s inability to come good in a majority of RCB’s run chases was a concern. “Consistent partnerships at the top order meant Kohli came to bat much later than we would have wanted him to, and that’s not something we can afford,” said Katich, also answering RCB’s decision to open with Kohli in the Eliminator.

While the rarely-logical excuses piled on, there was a decent range of positives to delve into, and Hesson got stuck into it, spending ample time lauding the Indian talent.

“The biggest takeaway for us was the success of Indian talent. We were surprised,” he said. “We were able to provide a consistent platform for them and they kept coming up with the goods. Guys like (Devdutt) Padikkal, (Mohammed) Siraj, (Navdeep) Saini, Washington (Sundar) and of course, Yuzi (Yuzvendra Chahal) were absolutely fantastic.”