Bungled run-chase leaves Riyan Parag baffled as his side fluffed their lines with victory right at their doorstep.
Bungled run-chase has left Royals’ skipper Riyan Parag flummoxed as they eventually fell short by 2 runs.
When chasing 181 against the Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) in Jaipur on Saturday, RR needed 25 runs from 18 balls and had eight wickets in hand, but they lost the Super Over. This is the second consecutive game that RR has failed to close a chase out. Three days ago, against the Delhi Capitals (DC), RR needed 23 runs off the final 12 deliveries with seven wickets remaining, but the game ended in a tie, and RR lost the Super Over.
Yashasvi Jaiswal was batting at 74 and Parag was at 38 with three overs remaining against LSG. However, the 18th over from Avesh Khan started with Jaiswal bowled by a yorker and ended with Parag trapped leg before wicket by another yorker after he attempted to scoop but missed. In the final over, against Avesh once more, Shimron Hetmyer and Dhruv Jurel could only muster six of the nine required.
After the latest reversal, RR’s stand-in captain Riyan Parag said such results were “really kind of hard to process”. “I don’t know what we did wrong. I felt we were in the game probably till the 18th over and 19th over, actually,” Parag said at the post-match presentation. “But yeah, I don’t know.”
“I think it’s something along those lines,” Parag said. “I blame myself for this. I probably should have finished it in the 19th over. But then, I don’t know if that was a bad decision for myself. I mean, we [have] just got to put one game together collectively for 40 overs. Only then can we expect a win.”
In order to get the target past RR, Parag also mentioned the final huge over with the ball. In that over, Abdul Samad hit the seasoned Sandeep Sharma for four sixes and took him for 27 runs. LSG went to 180 as a result.
“I think we did really well [with the ball]. The last over was unfortunate,” he said. “I kind of thought we would stop them at like 165, [or] 170 max. The last over was unfortunate. Sandy bhai is trusted. I think he just had one bad game, and Abdul Samad batted really well. So I thought we were like probably 20 runs over par [or] 15 runs over par. But we should have chased that down.”