Still seeking the right tune and all that...

Kolkata Knight Riders Official Instagram Page (@kkriders)

So we lose our second match on the trot, and I felt we brought it upon ourselves. It’s important to move on quickly. However, dismissing these unsuccessful two games as “early days” of the tournament is dangerous. Before we know it, we’ll find ourselves lurking somewhere at the bottom of the points table with 4-5 games to go. God forbid that’s not the case, but this tournament progresses quickly. Alright, what did we learn from our rather insipid performance last night against the most balanced and settled squad of the tournament (if only I could say that about the team we fielded last night, because it wasn’t anything but balanced and settled).

Narine of old with the ball is back – Narine with the bat misfired again, and that had more to do with the position he was sent in to bat more than anything else. But the biggest positive from last game was that Narine showed us shades of the way he bowled during 2012 and 2014, which was validated by his bowling figures last night. His spells reminded us of the way batsmen would struggle to play him during the two years I referred to above, as he became one of the biggest contributors of both our IPL trophies in those years. Let’s hope he maintains this bowling form through the tournament.

Too much of chopping and changing backfired – Heath Streak did gives us all a heads up that the squad would be seeing some “changes” after our first loss. As it turned out, the fact that we saw the changes did not come as a surprise, but the quantum of changes certainly did - three changes from the squad that played CSK, in addition to some unorganized shuffling in the batting order that did not seem fully thought through. I felt these were two major reasons why we didn’t fire as a collective unit, eventually leading to our loss.  

Need to show more faith in our U-19s – I was personally super kicked when I got to know that both, Gill and Mavi, were going to play last night. But as it turned out, both our young guns seemed to be a part of the squad only on the team sheet, and nothing beyond that. Batting Gill at 7 and giving Mavi a go as late as over number 15 (when the match was already lost), was not the ideal way to unveil these guys on the IPL stage. Both of them looked nervous beyond measure, and that was only natural. But they just seemed completely out of sorts because they weren’t playing at their usual spots. I’m sure we’re going to see a lot more them in this tournament going forward, and I hope we play them where they are meant to be played, thereby instilling the faith we have in their talent.

A little too much reliance on the spin arsenal – If the last three games are anything to go by, we’re struggling to find the required firepower that we need from our pace attack, which translates to us being over reliant on Narine, Kuldeep and Chawla. After our opening game, I was one of the many who thought that Stark’s absence wouldn’t hamper us in a big way. We’re on the brink of our 4^th game now, and we still don’t know who the leader of our pace attack is, and that’s because Curran and Johnson are going to be played in turns from the looks of it. Big, big concern!

We’re yet to see Lynn at his best – Yes, he scored 49 in decent time last night, but Lynn was far from convincing. He just seems to be struggling to hit the sweet spot. Most of his boundaries are mistimed shots that somehow end up reaching the fence by virtue of his inherent strength. Yes, you need the muscle to smash those sixes out of the park, but at the end of the day, it’s timing and consistency that determines a batsman’s form and Lynn is yet to show the kind of form we require him to, at the top of the order.