Punjab Kings have lost three matches on the trot, and the slump could be blamed on their poor catching.
The Shreyas Iyer-led side dropped three catches and missed one stumping chance as Sunrisers Hyderabad recorded a 33-run win on Wednesday. Even in their previous matches, Shashank Singh had been a serial offender for dropping chances, though they didn’t have to pay dearly for such lapses.
Lockie Ferguson and Cooper Connolly joined Shashank in putting down sitters, with head coach Ricky Ponting going to the extent of saying it had spread “like a virus”.
“We’ve put a lot of catches down so far this season. The boys have worked exceptionally hard and, you know, poor old Shashank there,” Ponting said. “It just looks like the ball is following him around everywhere he goes.”
“He (Shashank) missed a couple of games with a left hamstring, so it’s taken him about a week-and-a-half to come back from that. He’s done all his work over the last week to be physically right to play, and we have really ramped up the catching drills over the last five or six days,” Ponting added.
Shreyas called the dropped catches “the biggest setback” and suggested that Punjab might have been chasing “30-40 runs” fewer had the catches been taken.
Punjab were left ruing those chances as Ishan Kishan and Heinrich Klaasen went on to make 55 and 69, respectively.
“It was very important for us to execute our plans and we did execute them. Unfortunately, catches were dropped and I think that hurt us,” Sairaj Bahutule, their spin-bowling coach, said at the news conference. “It was very important to take those catches because they are such players (Ishan and Klaasen) that if you tend to drop catches, they will score and score quickly.
“I think definitely catching could have changed the momentum of the game. There would have been fresh batters on the pitch and we could have executed our plans more effectively and then ended up maybe giving more than 50 runs less.”
Ponting couldn’t hide his disappointment after the third dropped chance — Ferguson putting down a sitter of Ishan at midwicket. Yuzvendra Chahal could barely hide his disbelief and sunk to the ground. “I am pretty close to throwing the microphone on the field,” Ponting said during the course of an interview to the broadcasters at the
10-over mark.
The lapses came immediately after a strategic timeout during which Ponting had rushed onto the field to lift his side’s morale. In Chahal’s next over, Kishan survived again when wicketkeeper Prabhsimran Singh missed a stumping chance, leaving the bowler visibly distraught.
Bahutule tried to defend Shashank. “Sometimes a player, for example, is not getting runs, there are a few innings in which he doesn’t get runs, and he starts thinking as to why he’s not getting runs; a bowler also starts getting hit and he wonders as to, ‘What is the reason? Why am I getting hit?’
“Fielding is the same thing... if you keep dropping catches, there is a sort of doubt created in the mind in terms of whether ‘I’m catching properly or am I taking the pressure, am I being too anxious’… things like that come creeping (in),” Bahutule said.
And as Ponting said, the “virus” seems to be spreading like wildfire.