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Tough times for Rajasthan Royals

G. Viswanath

Kings XI Punjab will test Warne’s fighting qualities

— Photo: R.V. Moorthy

SHOULDERING RESPONSIBILITY: Darren Lehmann (foreground) and Yusuf Pathan will have to lend more support to skipper Shane Warne for Rajasthan Royals to come up with better performances.

Jaipur: On Saturday’s night’s evidence at the Ferozeshah Kotla, Rajasthan Royals was all at sea, unable to come to terms with the slam-bang version of the game.

Signs of the Royals’ inadequacy emerged soon after Akshay Kumar’s stunt and the assorted bunch floundered and was outclassed by Delhi Daredevils.

Clearly Shane Warne’s bunch looks very weak and shaky and may have quickly taken the underdog tag in the DLF-IPL Twenty20 competition.

Warne has been an aggressive leg-spinner, a champion cricketer of many years and a shrewd judge of the game. One defeat — though his team was beaten by nine wickets — is unlikely to make him press the panic button.

Determined cricketer

On a day when the top-order failed to find ways to split the field, show some enterprise and bring into play the innovative, big shots, he did not let his determination weaken and showed the urgency to maximise the team score.

A pull shot off Tasmanian Brett Geeves and a few more off-side shots that dissected the field, when the chips were down, suggested that nothing will break his will to fight.

He also sent down a few decent balls, though the Daredevils scored a runaway victory.

On paper the Royals team is thin on the quality batsmen count, a fact seamer Munaf Patel admitted when given the rare opportunity at the media conference. Not a proficient man of words, Munaf went to the extent of saying that Warne was the only big name in the side and the rest were just average.

Fortunately the teammate sitting beside him was Taruwar Kohli. But, even as Royals lost its way, Dinesh Salunkhe, the winner of the Cricket Star talent hunt show last year who spent some quality time at Leicestershire, showed that he has the wherewithal to measure up to the standards at this level.

Less than 24 hours after tasting defeat, Warne led his team into the Future Academy’s outdoor facility on a typically oppressive afternoon on Sunday, and supervised a centre-wicket practice session simulating a match-like situation.

“That’s the best way to experience when and how runs can be taken. We have more domestic players, but with little exposure. If a team loses two or three wickets quickly in this form of the game, it’s a definite setback. The more time the top order batsmen spend in the middle, the better it is. We are not at all mentally down, anything can happen in a Twenty20 match,”said Munaf.

Cricket has such an emotional impact on its supporters that on Monday the home crowd will root for the team and expect an improved performance leading to a win. The Royals team revolves around Warne and sure enough he would have made a private introspection of the team’s capabilities in order to face the challenge from the Kings XI Punjab, which has a heavy top and middle-order line-up and Brett Lee as the bowling spearhead.

The teams (from):

Rajasthan Royals: Shane Warne (Capt.), Yusuf Pathan, Mohammad Kaif, Darren Lehmann, Munaf Patel, Shane Watson, Siddharth Trivedi, Taruwar Kohli, Ravindra Jadeja, Pankaj Singh, Swapnil Asnodkar, Neeraj Patel, Mahesh Rawat, Sumit Khatri, Dinesh Salunkhe, Jaydev Shah, Aditya Angle, Parag More and Anup Revandkar.

Kings XI Punjab: Yuvraj Singh (Capt.), Mahela Jayawardene, Kumar Sangakkara, Kyle Mills, Shaun Marsh, Irfan Pathan, Ramesh Powar, S. Sreesanth, Piyush Chawla, James Hopes, Simon Katich, Brett Lee, Luke Pomersbach, Ajitesh Argal, Pankaj Dharmani, Rishi Dhawan, Karan Goel, Uday Kaul, Sahil Kukreja, Wilkin Mota, Nitin Saini, V.R.V. Singh, Sunny Sohal and Tanmay Srivastava.

Match starts at 8 p.m.

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