Rahul Dravid admits there is no margin for error for RR with every game assuming must-win significance from here on.
Rahul Dravid admits his Rajasthan side cannot afford any more mistakes for the rest of the season.
Siraj Mohammed. KL Rahul. Chahal Yuzvendra. In IPL 2025, former RCB players have come back to Bengaluru one by one and helped defeat their old team. The focus is now on Rahul Dravid.
Now leading the Rajasthan Royals from the dugout, the first RCB skipper returns home with the burden of reviving a struggling campaign. RR is on a four-game losing streak and has only won two of their last eight games.
“Is there an RCB player from the previous game? Put him in the starting lineup right away. On Wednesday, Dravid, the head coach of RR, chuckled, possibly forgetting for a moment that Shimron Hetmyer and Wanindu Hasaranga had formerly played for RCB. During their 2022 playoff run, Hasaranga was their leading wicket-taker.
“No, not at all, man. I don’t think about it like that, to be very honest. Just trying to play a good game of cricket,” Dravid was quick to clarify. “We know we have to play well to be still alive in this tournament. I know we’ve lost a couple of close games coming into this, but we’ve played some good cricket as well. It’s one of those tournaments where a few balls going here or there and we might have been in a slightly different position, but you need to play well in those critical moments.”
So far this season, hitters have found the pitches at Chinnaswamy Stadium to be difficult. In their home games, RCB has lost each time despite scoring 169 for 8, 163 for 7, and 95 for 9 in the opening innings of a 14-over match.
“You just have to go for it irrespective and that’s a given,” Dravid said when asked about how to approach batting on such surfaces. “But I think every surface will be different. The last one, I was just having a chat with the groundsman, it was under covers for a really long period of time, so it was probably not a good one to judge it on.
“The wicket I’m seeing here, from at least what I can make of it, looks a really good wicket, so I can’t really say how those wickets looked in earlier games. But the track that’s been produced for this one looks actually to be a very good cricket wicket and I think it should be a pretty high-scoring game.
“Like I said earlier, it’s a very important game for us. Every game from here on, the position we find ourselves in, we can’t afford to make many mistakes. We’ve got to start climbing that table quickly and we’ve got to start winning games quickly, there’s no options, no chances of slipping up anymore.”