Punjab Kings head coach Ricky Ponting lauded the team’s efforts in the 17th edition of IPL after his side went down to Royal Challengers Bangalore by 6 runs in the final clash at Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. After electing to bowl, PBKS restricted the opposition to 190/9 in 20 overs, with both Arshdeep Singh and Kyle Jamieson claiming three wickets each.
“The way that we’ve been able to play our cricket, it’s been a highly entertaining team to watch, and that for a coach to be able to sit back and talk about a team that way gives me a lot of satisfaction. You can probably look at it tonight and say was it probably a little bit of inexperience in the middle order cost us. But what I know is that we are going to have these younger guys (Prabhsimran Singh, Priyansh Arya, Nehal Wadhera) with us for a long , and I think they’re going to win us a lot of games going forward,” Ponting said at the post-match press conference.
Meanwhile, Shashank Singh played a stunning knock in the end, scoring an unbeaten 61 off 30 balls in the final, but he was unable to take the team home. Ponting disagreed with the remarks that the batting track was a slow one as well.
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“There’s no excuses from us. Shashank at the end of the game said he thinks that was the best wicket he has batted on for the whole season. We just lost a bit of momentum at a critical time in probably the last couple of overs of the power play and we lost critical wickets,” Ponting said.
“It was only a couple of days that we were here celebrating one of our great wins for the season to get into the final, and today we probably feel that we have let one slip. But with this group being as young as it is, we will be back bigger and stronger next season,” he said.
“I think it’s always easy to make observations from the outside but I made it pretty clear when I was appointed as head coach that I wanted to make sure things were different. I wanted to make sure things were done in a certain way from the top. I wanted to make things different, I wanted to make significant change, and I think we have managed to do that,” Ricky Ponting concluded.
