Former Australia white-ball captain Aaron Finch has minced no words as he shredded Kolkata Knight Riders’ approach in the IPL 2025 game against Gujarat Titans.
Ajinkya Rahane’s side fell 39 runs short against the Shubman Gill-led side as they failed to chase down the target of 199. Speeding up their chase, KKR lost 2 wickets for 68 runs by the end of ten overs with Rahane and Venkatesh Iyer at the crease.
Rahane eventually scored 50 runs off 36 deliveries, while Iyer failed after departing 14 runs off 19 deliveries.
Venkatesh Iyer failed to hit a single four or six in his innings. Despite cameo knocks from Andre Russell and Angkrish Raghuvanshi, they failed to chase the target.
The defeat now leaves KKR’s hopes of playoff clueless, with needing five wins out of six games remaining in the group stages.
“You need to have an intent to take spin down. You can’t hit a six or a boundary if you’re not trying to, if your first instinct is to just knock it into the leg side and run one. Then you’re on a hiding to nothing, and it was just mesmerising, the lack of intent.”
“They had nine batters in their team. That automatically tells me they are going to be ultra-aggressive at the start, try to get up to or ahead of the [required] run rate, so that when the wicket deteriorates, there’s room for error,” said Aaron Finch.
“For me, that was just a really poor calculation of how to go about a run chase of 200. There are nine batters, you don’t need to rebuild anything. The game was over after ten [overs], wasn’t it? They just let the required run rate get so far out of hand.”
“It was so strange to watch them just trying to knock it around. Very, very strange innings. They went out with the attitude not to lose by 100 runs. It was almost like, ‘You know what, let’s get 160, and we’ll walk off. We’ll be okay with that.’ That was a horrible batting display,” Aaron Finch added.
Kolkata Knight Riders has three wins out of eighth games and secured 7th position in the IPL 2025 Points table.
Kolkata Knight Riders will play their next game against Punjab Kings on April 26 at Eden Gardens, Kolkata.
