IPL 2022 – Needs To Bat “Quicker Rather Than Longer”: Sanjay Manjrekar On KL Rahul’s Knock vs RCB In Eliminator

The KL Rahul-led Lucknow Super Giants’ Indian Premier League (IPL) 2022 campaign ended on Wednesday as his team lost the Eliminator to Royal Challengers Bangalore. Chasing a target of 208, LSG looked on track in the chase until the time Rahul was at the crease. The LSG skipper scored 79 off 58 balls at a strike-rate of 136.20. He fell in the 19th other and then his team fell short by 14 runs. Sanjay Manjrekar, former Indian cricket team player, was not impressed about the speed with which batter scored. Rahul, who is also the India captain for the upcoming T20I series against South Africa, has not had a strike-rate of 140 or more in the last four editions of the IPL.

“KL Rahul’s innings is something that we’ve seen before when he was captaining Punjab Kings, for example, [and they] would fall short of a run-chase,” Manjrekar told Cricinfo.

“The scenario would be the same. You’ll have KL Rahul batting right till the very end, they would have lost three or four wickets and people like [Nicholas] Pooran would come in like Evin Lewis came in the last two overs and Krunal [Pandya] in the last, [Marcus] Stoinis in the last three. So [for them], it’s a bit working with the crumbs that are left. You’ve got to come in and try to make up for the lack of pace that the innings had.

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“KL Rahul himself has the ability to do that. You see every time he decided to play the big shot, it came off. He played a couple of terrific shots against [Josh] Hazlewood. He can do it when he wants to but he just has this very deep-rooted belief, or an attitude, or an approach, that he wants to bat longer rather than quicker.

“If I was his coach, I would just take that decision out of his hand even if he’s the captain, for we’ve seen a lot of games where the teams would benefit immensely if KL Rahul just batted quicker rather than longer.”