Punjab Kings head coach Ricky Ponting thinks lack of experience led to their narrow six-run loss in the IPL final in Ahmedabad on Tuesday.

He promised the same competitive and aggressive cricket from his players next season. “I can’t speak highly enough for what those young boys have done through the tournament,” Ponting said.

“I think I talked at the first press conference I had with Shreyas (Iyer) about becoming a daring, dynamic, and different team.

“On the back of that, what Prabh (Prabhsimarn Singh) and Priyansh (Arya) and (Nehal) Wadhera and these sort of guys were able to do, there’s probably enough been said through the media over the last couple of months. The way that we’ve been able to play our cricket, it’s been highly entertaining. For a coach to be able to sit back and say that about a team gives me a lot of satisfaction.

“You can probably look at it tonight (Tuesday) and say, ‘was it probably a little bit of inexperience that cost us?’ Maybe a little bit of experience in that middle order might have helped us out, but what I know is that we’re going to have these younger guys around this team for a long time and I think they’re going to win us a lot of games going forward.”

Ponting is confident that they will emerge stronger from this defeat.

“We’ve got it right for most of the year... It was only a couple of days ago that we were here celebrating one of our great wins for the season to get into the final, and now we probably feel that we’ve let one slip, but as I said, with this group being as young as it is, we’ll be back bigger and stronger next season.”

The Australian pointed out the importance of winning the IPL trophy by bringing
up Virat Kohli’s emotional reaction.

“You can see in his eyes in that last over, he was shedding a tear, that’s what it means to players, that’s what it means to everyone... It’s not an easy tournament to win and you have to think long and hard about that. It’s not easy to win this thing,” Ponting said.