Mohali,
\nKings XI Punjab opener Lokesh Rahul has shot a warning to rival teams in the Indian Premier League: beware of Chris Gayle as he is back to his brutal best.<\/p>\n
Gayle, playing his first game of the season, smashed his second fastest IPL fifty, off 22 balls, to lay the foundation for KXIP\u2019s thrilling four-run win over Chennai Super Kings on Sunday night.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is amazing news for our team and bad news for the other teams that Chris Gayle is hitting the ball well. We all know he is a player who can win games singlehandedly and demolish attacks on his day and that\u2019s what he did today. We want him and we expect him to continue this form forward,\u201d said Rahul, who himself has been in top form, at the post-match media interaction.<\/p>\n
Not so long ago, Gayle went unsold in the auction twice before KXIP picked him up for a base price of Rs 2 crore, the same amount they paid for Yuvraj Singh.<\/p>\n
KXIP play their next home game against Sunrisers Hyderabad.<\/p>\n
Asked about the plans against Sunrisers, Rahul said, \u201cEvery team in the IPL is good, we are going to stick to our plans, we will stick to our strengths, we will see where we can better Sunrisers Hyderabad.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur plans are going to be simple whichever team we face and we will go out there and play aggressive cricket.\u201d<\/p>\n
About batting first and setting the target for the opposition, he said \u201cif you are batting first as an opener, you give yourselves a couple of overs, see what\u2019s the wicket behaving and then try to assess what a good score on that wicket would be and then you plan accordingly.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy the look of the wicket, I don\u2019t think anybody can tell the wicket is going to behave a certain way. Even though this is our home game, we are still getting to know what the wicket is like. Once we play a couple of overs then we decide what a good target on that wicket is,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
CSK skipper MS Dhoni almost got CSK over the line with a refreshing 79 off 44 balls.<\/p>\n
Asked what the plan was to contain him, Rahul said \u201cthe plan was to bowl wide yorkers at him because he was struggling with his back…but good back or bad back you pitch it in his arc and he is still going to hit it miles. It was good learning for our bowling attack, but still early stage in this IPL.\u201d<\/p>\n
CSK head coach Stephen Fleming said Gayle played really well and that made a big difference.<\/p>\n
Fleming, however, said CSK did \u201cincredibly well\u201d to restrict the score to somewhere under 200 because at one stage KXIP looked poise to reach 220 plus.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo the character for the second half of that bowling innings was very good as we were able to get some wickets, create some pressure\u2026So, I am really impressed and proud of the effort,\u201d said the New Zealander.<\/p>\n
About advantage of chasing, Fleming said, \u201cWhen you are chasing you get certainty in an uncertain game, so you can manage your risk as you saw MS managing his risk almost to perfection today. There were a couple of good yorkers from Mohit Sharma (in the final over) that denied the win (to CSK).<\/p>\n
\u201cSo the way game is going, there is certainty around managing risk and the ability of players to hit and chase down 15, 16 and 18 runs an over…,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mohali, Kings XI Punjab opener Lokesh Rahul has shot a warning to rival teams in the Indian Premier League: beware of Chris Gayle as he is back to his brutal best. Gayle, playing his first game of the season, smashed his second fastest IPL fifty, off 22 balls, to lay the foundation for KXIP\u2019s thrilling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28363,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28362"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28364,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28362\/revisions\/28364"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}