Lucknow: Lucknow Supergiants are feeling the heat this season in the IPL. LSG have won just two out of six games and are just one place above bottom-placed Kolkata Knight Riders in the table. However, LSG’s bowling coach Bharat Arun Didn’t seem too worried about their sub-par performance and were hopeful for the team to bounce back in the coming games. Interview excerpts Your team conceded more than 250 points in the game punjab kings. What went wrong with LSG? I won’t read too much into that one game. Our bowling team has performed very well in previous games. Sometimes games like this happen. Even ball selection may not be ideal at certain stages. But there is nothing to worry about as our bowlers are good enough to come back strong. You will have seen in the previous games that our bowlers executed our plan very well. These things can happen. Sports are also about failure and, more importantly, about how strongly you react to failure. This defines the type of athlete you are.
Does the lack of early wickets put too much pressure on the middle overs? We did get a wicket early but then their batsmen played really well. In the Powerplay, our ball selection was not very good and this is something we can improve on. If you’re not bowling well, that’s a bigger problem. But if the issue is making the right choices, then this can certainly be rectified in the coming games. You haven’t been able to take advantage of home field advantage. Are the conditions not right for your attack? No, I don’t think that’s the case. If you look at it, our bowling has been pretty good at home. It was more about our hitting being one good game away from actually hitting the ball. Even in the Punjab game, despite the loss, the positive was that our batsman count was close to 200. This is encouraging for us and I am sure the batting group will gain confidence from this effort. How do you manage the balance of overseas versus Indian bowlers? Our bowling attack is predominantly Indian. In fact, except Anrich NortjeInjuries are back and our bowling group doesn’t have a real overseas presence yet. But this is a very exciting Indian bowling team and we have full confidence in them. Which phase of the inning are you most concerned about right now: the power play, center field or death? I can’t reveal exactly what the data is right now, but we know the areas that need to be addressed. We have realigned the bowling role and it has worked well except for one match. So that’s not our main concern at this stage. If the same PBKS batting line-up came to you tomorrow, would you do anything differently from the first ball? We’re definitely going to solve it differently, but if we play again you’ll see that.
