“Thank you. When GT is playing, don’t think that, eh?”
“We were targeting 45 in three overs and that is very much gettable,” Gill said, as he broke down the way he and his team go about a T20 chase. “Fifteen runs per over [means] you just need two hits in the over and that was the mindset at that time. Mathematically, both batsmen need to score nine-ball 22 runs and if you think like that, okay, its three hits in nine balls and if one of the batsmen goes berserk, you’ll see the match getting over in two three balls. [Impact sub] definitely makes a difference, if you have an extra batter there. But it’s just the mindset [thinking of 45 in three overs as needing just two hits an over] to make things more easy, more simple.”
Gill himself contributed 72 off 44 balls. It was a stunning innings, especially how he went after R Ashwin and Yuzvendra Chahal who are the Royals’ bankers in the middle overs. The Titans captain looked set to do it all on his own when he fell trying to hit a third boundary in three balls against Chahal in the 16th over and left the field smashing his bat into the turf. Titans, who came into this match with only two wins in five, needed 64 off 28 balls at that point.
“I would have loved to finish the game [myself],” Gill said, “But very happy with the way Rashid [Khan] bhai and Rahul [Tewatia] bhai finished the game for us. In the past couple of matches as well, I thought we dominated more than 50% of the game and the bad phase was we played really bad cricket and that’s why we lost. This game, we were there and thereabouts, we were a little bit behind the game and then winning the game on the last ball is always a great feeling.”
This was the fourth time (out of eight tries) that Titans have chased down 15 or more runs in the final over in the IPL. Having done so, they left the opposition captain lost for words.
“To be honest it’s very hard to speak at the moment actually,” Samson, who scored an unbeaten 68 off 38, said. “It’s the hardest job in the tournament when the captain loses the game and he is supposed to tell where we lost actually. When the emotion calms down a bit, after few hours, I might tell you where exactly we lost.
“You have to give credit to the Gujarat Titans, the way they bowled, the way the batted, the way they fought. When I was batting I thought something around 180 was a fighting score. I think the way Shimron Hetmyer dominated at the end of the innings and we got 196, I thought that was a winning score on this wicket. I think there was no dew. The wicket was a bit dry and low and with our bowling line-up we should have done it.”