We were shocked: CSK head coach Fleming accepts after defeat | Indian Premier League, 2024

You don’t hear this often, but the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) head coach admitted his team was “shocked” by the “onslaught of pressure” due to Shubman’s “high caliber batting” Gill and Sai Sudharsan. .

Batting, Gill and Sudharsan, who are not regular opening partners for Gujarat Titans (GT), set an opening record of 210 runs to stun CSK. The pair started moderately but accelerated extraordinarily to take GT from 58/0 in 6 overs to 209/0 in 17 overs.

This threw CSK’s plans into disarray, leading to a comedy of usually unseen errors, including dropped catches.

“I think we got through plan B and plan C pretty quickly and maybe started to get into plan D,” CSK head coach Stephen Fleming said with a slight smile during the post-match press conference.

“It was a high caliber stick. Sometimes you have to take your cap off and say well done, and on this occasion I thought these two were brilliant. We were quite shaken and even our squad, which has been good over the years, was put behind. There were some dropped catches, which was a bit unusual for us.

While Sudharsan and Gill were enthusiastic, the CSK skipper called on slow-medium bowler Daryl Mitchell to bowl. Mitchell played mainly as a batter for CSK and played only once in the season, which also happened against GT, but at Chepauk, where he bowled two overs for 18 and picked up a wicket . However, he was punished mercilessly by GT’s opening matches in Ahmedabad and gave away 52 runs in his four overs.

“He (captain Ruturaj Gaikwad) saw in Mitchell an opportunity to change the pace of the game,” Fleming said, explaining why Mitchell had to play his full quota that day.

“And to be honest, we were trying to find a way to stop them, but at that point there was no help anywhere. He (Mitchell) did a good job. We could have cut and changed in the middle, but we were shocked. We were put behind, there was a build-up of pressure and we were slow to react.

Mitchell’s bowling in the middle was also due to the absences and injuries that have plagued CSK’s bowling attack as they are missing key pacers in Matheesha Pathirana, Mustafizur Rahman and Deepak Chahar.

“We were a little handicapped by the absence of certain players. But the players who played this match did well in the last match and their confidence was pretty high. However, they were against the high caliber hitters, and that made us look a little sloppy,” Fleming agreed.

CSK have two games left and they can still look to qualify relatively comfortably as they have the second best net run rate this season (+0.491).

If they win their remaining two matches, against Rajasthan at home and against Bengaluru at the Chinnaswamy, they will reach 16 points and could even have a chance at the top two, depending on other results.

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