Legendary Australia captain and Delhi head coach Ricky Ponting said that he was almost embarrassed by his team’s performance against Kolkata Knight Riders, following their 106-run loss at the ACA-VDCA Stadium in Vizag. Delhi faced to their third defeat of the season as KKR battered them in Vizag to move to the top of the IPL 2024 points table as well. Meanwhile, Delhi moved down to the ninth spot, having registered just one win from their opening four matches this season as well.

Speaking at the post-match press-conference, Ponting said, “It’s pretty hard to assess right now. I mean I was almost embarrassed with our first half of the game today. To concede that many runs, we bowled 17 wides and it took us two hours to bowl our overs as well, so we were two overs behind again, which means the guys bowling last two overs only get to bowl with four fieldsmen outside the circle. Lot of things happened in this game that were unacceptable and a lot of things we will talk as a group tonight that we have to fix immediately to go forward in the competition. There will be some good open discussions in the changing room for sure.”

However, Ricky Ponting applauded KKR’s young batter Angkrish Raghuvanshi, saying that he played really well and allowed Andre Russell to play his natural game as well. Raghuvanshi smashed a 27-ball 54 against Delhi, becoming the seventh-youngest batter to score a fifty in the tournament as well.

“I thought the youngster at No.3 (Angkrish Raghuvanshi) played really well and that allowed Russ (Andre Russell) and all those guys to play the way they always play. And they had wickets in hand, so they can keep going hard. They did lots of things really well but we got to be really critical of ourselves, on our own performances, and we got to look at ways to get better for the next game,” concluded Ricky Ponting.