Vettori feels KKR needs to have better bowling line-up to be in top 4

The Kolkata Knight Riders had shown promises at the beginning of the season, winning four out of the first six games. Funnily enough, the team’s downfall started after they lost four home games in a row at the Eden Gardens. The playoffs of IPL 2019 kicks off on Tuesday, and Kolkata Knight Riders were knocked out of the competition on Sunday. Diving deep into KKR’s major concerns of the season, Daniel Vettori has shared his opinions.

The first cause of concern as was pointed out is KKR’s poor bowling performance. Vettori was blatant in opining that the bowling attack of the Knight Riders won’t be his choice of strike bowlers and hence he deems it necessary for KKR to go for an overseas fast bowler as the next season will have the Australian fast bowlers coming back. 

Daniel Vettori, as quoted by EspnCricinfo, said, “next year stark and Cummins will be prized assets for any team and I know that KKR bought Starc two years ago… but he never played a game for them… but I think he could make KKR strong that overseas bowling unit.”

The discussion further went on to the unsettled opening batsmen combination and Vettori termed that Chris Lynn and Sunil Narine combination to be an “experiment” that was working for them last season this time around it didn’t get going.

To quote him, “I mean that’s an experiment but not experiment that’s the go-to thing when you need a quick start maybe takes a little bit of pressure off of Lynn. I think that Lynn and Rana…and I think Gill’s the guy to go to… we’ve seen enough quality today what and I got beaten by a good slow ball from heartache but otherwise, he’s got the game to counter the new ball and score quickly enough.” 

“I think Lynn is the key I think… he allows whoever there the opening better is to play a natural game in there and they have stumbled on Shubhman Gill as the best partnership… but I see those guys going forward [as openers] and probably Nitish Rana at three and if you have those three guys going well that’s an incredibly strong top three,” the 40-year-old added.

Vettori feels the RCB and KKR are over-reliant on their best batsmen

Finally, it came down to the over-reliance on the power-hitter Calypso Andre Russell who single-handedly won most games for KKR.  For that Vettori said, “I think that’s the thing that you want to avoid that as soon as he comes out ‘okay we’ll be right now moving on to Russell’s here’ …and I think you say the same for Kohli and De Villiers [for RCB] I think that’s when teams feel over-reliant.”

He concluded by saying that it’s a good thing that Russell has performed exceptionally well this season but he can’t win all games for his team. He feels that a team should be equipped enough to face situations after their best batsmen is out, much like what the CSK do.

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