Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) captain KL Rahul scored 82 in 53 balls as part of a 134-run opening partnership with Quinton de Kock as they beat Chennai Super Kings (CSK) by eight wickets. LSG chased down a target of 177 with an over to spare and thus recorded their fourth win of the season.
KL Rahul, skipper of LSG and Player of the Match, said, Feels good at the end of the day. When you win, most decisions feel right. We were committed to our plans. Really happy with that. Depends on the wicket, I deploy my bowlers. We tried to mix it around. The bowlers executed really well. The team is sticking to the plans. Halfway stage, I would have been happy with 160. The wicket was slow and a bit of grip. MSD walked in and the pressure got to the bowlers. He has had the intimidation on opposition bowlers. Our young bowlers were put under pressure with the crowd going berserk as well. 15-20 runs extra they got. I have been trying to assess the situation. It came off today. I knew the CSK spinners will put the pressure on. I picked my bowlers and it came off. Quinton batted well as well. Made life easy for both. Different ball game playing in Chennai. Was playing in front of mini Chennai crowd. We are a young team and happy to play in front of such a crowd.
Ruturaj Gaikwad, said, We finished well with the bat, couldn’t have asked more with the situation we were in. After powerplay we couldn’t capitalize on the start we got and we kept losing wickets at regular intervals. I would say we were 10-15 runs short. Slightly difficult with such a total, with the impact sub rule you need 10-15 or even 20 runs extra. Pitches like these seem sluggish to start off with but with dew coming on it gets better, 190 would have been a good score. One area we would like to improve in taking wickets in the powerplay. That will put pressure on the opposition. We need to work on it. Good to play them again (next game at Chepauk). We will come up with good homework done now that we have three home games.
Marcus Stoinis said, We did need that, it was an very important win for us. We’ve got these guys – Chennai – in a couple of days’ time, it’s important two games for us, it’s nice to be back on the winning board. We are playing good cricket. With how we started with the ball and taking early wickets, I think we could have kept them under that total. Hats off to the way they played and they finished obviously with MS. They played well towards the end but it’s a nice wicket and we built some partnerships. Quinny (de Kock) and KL batted beautifully to pretty much seal it and then Nicky (Pooran) came in and iced the cake. That’s an important partnership for us at the top. Having that continuity, having them get us off to a start allows us to play the rest of the innings and to build an order around it as well. We’ve got that confidence with our team and the nice thing about this season so far is there’s been different boys stepping up and chipping in to win these games at different stages. We’ve had our bowling attack bowl well, we’ve had our batters bat well, had our opening partnership tonight.
