IPL 2020: 3 Mistakes committed by the losing side in RR vs RCB

Rajasthan Royals lost their sixth game of the tournament as their bowlers flunked to defend a decent total. RR scored 177/6 with Steve Smith scoring a remarkable fifty. However, the pitch didn’t deteriorate much and RCB exploited the same with AB de Villiers scoring an impeccable knock to take the team over the line.

RR’s intent looked quite positive since the beginning with Robin Uthappa opening the innings for them with quickfire innings. However, the result still stayed the same as RR ended up on the losing end. With five matches remaining, RR find themselves in a must-win situation and to win all games they need clarity in their combination, which is missing at the moment.

Here are the three mistakes committed by RR in Match 33, RR vs RCB:-

1. Playing Ben Stokes as an opener yet again

RR have tried 5 opening combinations their 9 games so far. With nothing working out, they tried Robin Uthappa and Ben Stokes as their opening pair. However, demoting Jos Buttler and playing Stokes as an opener turned out to be a catastrophe as both of them didn’t look comfortable in their unusual positions. It has been three innings of Stokes opening the batting and RR should play the southpaw in the middle order to provide the best chance to their strongest match winners.

2. Bowling too many wide by RR’s bowlers

RCB were under pressure as they were not able to score many runs during the middle overs. However, instead of sustaining the pressure, RR bowled too many wide balls while trying too many things with the ball. Rajasthan bowled 11 wides in total and in a game which went till the last over, this had a major impact. If they would have bowled with more discipline, RCB would have tried for more big hits which could have turned the things in RR’s favour.

3. Giving the penultimate to Jaydev Unadkat

RCB needed 35 runs in the last two overs with Jofra Archer and Jaydev Unadkat left with one each. While defending a total, usually the captains go with their most reliable bowler to bowl the second last over as the last over automatically brings pressure on the batsmen. Archer should have been a go-to bowler for Steve Smith in this situation as even if he had given 15 runs, Unadkat would have got 20 runs to defend in the last over.

However, the RR skipper went with Unadkat for the penultimate over and AB de Villiers jumped onto the opportunity and RCB scored 25 runs in the 19th over. With just 10 runs remaining to score in the last over, the pressure was on Archer and the red army chased the total down quite easily.