Chennai: Kolkata Knight Riders once again failed to deliver under pressure, losing a closely-contested match against the Chennai Super kings by 14 runs. Speaking at the presentation ceremony, Knights’ captain Gautam Gambhir said that they gave away 20 runs extra and that cost them the game.

The following are excerpts

Mahendra Singh Dhoni: We bowled some poor overs in the middle and towards the end… I would say poor because the bowlers failed to execute the plans. We had planned something and the bowlers were not following them. They were not bowling to the field… In fact, they were wayward.

I keep telling the bowlers that they need to bowl yorkers… Yorkers are difficult to hit… Yes, a few of them might turn out to be full-tosses and some of them might be hit for boundaries… But then, it’s the best recipe when it comes to T20 format, especially when you have scored a lot of runs. So that’s an area where we need to improve. But overall, I am happy with their performance.

Mike Hussey batted really well and he was ably supported by Wriddhiman Saha… They gave us a good start. Then Suresh Raina came in and capitalised on the start.

In the bowling department, Mohit Sharma was superb upfront. There was pressure on him to perform and he did well. He managed to get his four overs through without giving away too many runs.

In this match, there were a few areas where we did perform poorly. If the bowling in the middle overs was a concern, so was our fielding. We need to improve our fielding and we need to work on it… We are playing back-to-back matches and the guys are a bit tired… We need to recharge our batteries because in this format, you need to be at your best on all occasions… A small mistake can cost you the game…

Gautam Gambhir: There is no shame in playing away… Actually, we can take a lot of positives out of this game… We did put up a good fight… The target of 201 was achievable… The way the boys batted was superb. When you are chasing a huge target, you always want to get off to a good start. We lost a couple of wickets at the start… But Bisla was terrific today… He was well supported by Eoin Morgan and Jacques Kallis. Unfortunately, in the end, we failed to finish it off.

Despite the loss, I would say that our batsmen showed a lot of character… Our middle-order was under a lot of pressure as runs were hard to come by. But this showing would give us a lot of confidence ahead of the next matches.

We needed to restrict them to 180… That would have been a par score on this wicket. But they got 20 runs extra… It was a bad day at office for our bowlers… There were some loose deliveries and we need to improve our bowling.

I chose to field because we felt that the ball would come on to the bat better under the lights. And it did pan out to be exactly that… Playing strokes was easier under the lights. But, as I have said earlier, had we restricted them to 180, we could have chased down the target.

I have always maintained that we are not playing poor cricket. It’s just that we are not being able to finish on the winning side. Hopefully, it will change from the next match.