Kolkata: Brendon McCullum, the Head Coach of Kolkata Knight Riders, singled out the attitude of Rahul Tripathi for praise as the team geared up to play their first match in Mumbai on Wednesday. The Eoin Morgan-led Knights, who finished the Chennai leg with one win from three games, will now take on a resurgent Chennai Super Kings in the evening game on a day of double-headers in Mumbai on Wednesday.
“Rahul Tripathi on the field was a massive positive, and read into this what you wish, but if we have 11 Rahul Tripathi attitudes and fielding abilities or commitment out there, we will certainly challenge a lot of teams a lot of time!” McCullum said, reflecting on Tripathi’s dedication.
Tripathi took a stunning catch running backwards to dismiss Skipper Virat Kohli and hand RCB the first jolt - an effort which even won him the Perfect Catch of the Match Award.
Yeah, look, I think in hindsight if we had our time again, we probably would have bowled Varun Chakravarthy in the first hour and next over when Maxwell did come out. But look, we were also trying to save Varun’s overs for AB de Villiers
The New Zealander, who has a special place in the journey of the Knights as being one of their former captains graduating in this role, did not see much reason to panic in their 38-run loss in chasing a 200-plus target against Royal Challengers Bangalore on Sunday.
‘Bazz,’ as he is nicknamed, insisted that not much had gone wrong in the batting, barring the fact that a couple of more partnerships were required while chasing a “few too many runs”.
“I thought our batting approach was really good. We were chasing few too many runs. But our batting was really good. And we played the game that could have got us across the line with another couple of more partnerships or if a few other things had gone well,” McCullum added.
McCullum, meanwhile, opened up on his skipper Eoin Morgan’s controversial decision of taking their mystery skipper Varun Chakravarthy off the attack after he picked up two vital wickets in the second over of the powerplay, including that of Kohli, in the second over of the innings. “Yeah, look, I think in hindsight if we had our time again, we probably would have bowled Varun Chakravarthy in the first hour and next over when Maxwell did come out. But look, we were also trying to save Varun’s overs for AB de Villiers.
“I think, in retrospect, we probably should have bowled that over. There were many other aspects in the game which we could just tidy up that could give us a much better chance against a team that was clearly very confident,’’ he further added.
