Punjab Kings (PBKS) head coach Ricky Ponting has been coaching teams in the IPL since 2014 but he called Tuesday’s low-scoring thriller against KKR “just about the best win that I’ve ever had” as a coach as well. Ponting watched the game from the sidelines as PBKS successfully defended 111, the lowest total that has been defended in IPL history as well. Ponting also said pulling off a win like this could be a “season-defining moment” as well.

“The heart rate still up a bit for me – it’s probably up over 200,” Ponting said to the broadcaster soon after the game. “I don’t need many of those games like that at my age of over 50 now. It just goes to show how funny a game it is. Only three days ago we couldn’t defend 246 [245] and here we are, defending 112 [111] with 16 runs up our sleeves. We actually said to the guys at the halfway mark that really small chases like this are sometimes the hardest. The wicket wasn’t easy. You can see right through the game it was holding up.”

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“But what about [Yuzvendra] Chahal tonight! How good a spell of bowling was that! We’ve actually put it on him a bit during the week. He had a fitness test before the game today with his shoulder injury that he picked up in the last game and I grabbed him at the warm-up, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Mate, are you OK?’ He said, ‘Coach, I’m 100% alright, let me out there’, and what a spell of bowling,” he again shared.

When he was asked what the talk was going on in the dressing room at the innings break, Ponting said that the win was sweet.

“Well, you can probably see the way we changed things up with the ball as well, with Marco [Jansen] taking the first over and [Xavier] Bartlett the second. Normally, it’s been a role for Arshdeep [Singh] with the brand new ball, but the match-ups tonight suggested that Jansen and Bartlett were better suited. But we just said that wins like this are always the sweetest ones. If we can pull this off, then this would be as good as a win most guys have probably been involved in. I’ve coached a lot of games in the IPL and that might just be about the best win that I’ve ever had,” he added.

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Ricky Ponting also said that his team’s batting, shot selection and decision-making were “all poor”, but he was impressed by how the team turned things around in the chase because their bowling, fielding and catching had been under the scanner for a few games as well.

“Even if we had lost that game, I couldn’t have been more proud of the way we went about the second half,” he said. “But when I saw us take the field, we got a couple of wickets early on and what we’ve been lacking is a bit of belief with the ball and a bit of energy in the field, and that was there for everyone to see tonight. So if we had gone down in a really close one, I would have been telling the guys that I actually thought that that was a season-defining moment,” Ricky Ponting concluded.