After the innings, when Ravi Shastri asked how he was feeling at the crease, Kohli said, “Yes, I felt great. A lot of people think that my T20 cricket is declining, but I feel like that.” Not at all. I feel like I’m playing my best T20 cricket again. I’m just enjoying myself, that’s how I play T20 cricket. If the situation allows me I’m looking forward to hitting the gaps, hitting a lot of wickets. Try to hit boundaries and hit big shots at the end.
“Strike rate, all that kind of stuff like I said earlier… you have to read the situation and rise to the occasion when the situation calls for it, and that’s something I take great pride in doing.” It happens, and I have been doing it for some time now. I am feeling very good with my game at the moment and the way I am batting in the middle.
Kohli said of that score and the conditions, “It was not easy to avoid spin and I think the strength of many of our fast bowlers was also taking away the pace.” “There is a lot on this pitch for our bowlers to make a dent in (the chase), and as you saw it was not as easy to hit big shots in the middle overs when the ground was spread out. So you had to hit a lot of gaps.” “And run two runs. If we can reduce those boundaries and now allow them to run two runs from those gaps, it will be a very difficult chase.”
But Gill’s unbeaten 104 off 52 balls ensured that didn’t happen, sending RCB out of the tournament as the Titans achieved their target in 19.1 overs.
“Obviously very disappointed,” du Plessis said after the game. “You get into the last game of the campaign, you want to make sure you get through. But we played a very strong team tonight, Shubman Gill played an amazing innings to get a century. We are looking forward to one or Zones were a bit behind in the two matches and when you are playing a team like this, they will take advantage of that.
“The conditions were really wet in the second innings, but I think the first innings was also wet because of a lot of moisture from the rain (which caused a 55-minute delay in the start). So we changed the ball three times, that’s how it was in the second There was a lot of grip in the innings. But I thought 195 was a good score, Virat played an incredible innings to give us a chance, but we needed Shubman’s wicket to feel that we were really in the game.’ ‘
One of the biggest positives for RCB this season was the opening partnership of Kohli and du Plessis. The pair added 939 runs in 14 innings and equaled Kohli and AB de Villiers’ record of most runs scored by a pair in a T20 tournament in IPL 2016.
“He (Kohli) has played really good cricket throughout the season,” Du Plessis said, “and as a partnership, I think there wasn’t a single game where we didn’t score 40 runs for the opening stand ( They had failed to add 40 runs (four out of 14 innings). So it was really pleasing for both of us that we gave the team a really good start. But this shows you that Virat still has a lot left in him in T20 cricket; He’s actually playing okay though.”