Top-order to blame for KXIP woes: Sanjay Bangar

MOHALI: Having guided Kings XI Punjab to the IPL final last season, Sanjay Bangar was taken on as assistant coach of Team India by the BCCI. He was omnipresent on the Australian tour right up to the World Cup. But things have not worked out well for him and KXIP this season, so much so that they are set to finish at the bottom of the points table.
On the eve of KXIP's final league match against table-toppers Chennai Super Kings, he conceded that things have not gone right at all this season.He said: "Surely, it's been a totally topsy-turvy thing. We need to go back to the drawing board and assess our strategies. The strategies we applied last season didn't work this season. Now whether we want to go into the next season using the same strategies or using a different combination, we will have to look at. But it's best done at the end of the IPL when all the dust has settled."
Bangar conceded that the main reason KXIP had struggled this IPL was due to the poor performance of the top three or four batsmen in the line-up. According to him not getting good starts from the openers proved to be the bane of the team, as they were not able to lay the platform for the middle-order.
Bangar pointed out: "In the list of leading run-scorers, you will see the names of David Warner, Brendon McCullum and AB de Villiers, Chris Gayle, Ajinkya Rahane and Lendl Simmons. A lot of top-order batsmen have done really well for their respective teams. So, if your top three or four guys aren't in the leading run-scorers' list, then obviously the team doesn't find itself in a very good position. That's where we were found lacking."
On repeatedly benching opener Virender Sehwag, Bangar said, "Unfortunately, even Viru realises that he was not able to give starts that he expects from himself and we had some very good players like Manan Vohra sitting on the bench. Viru just couldn't fire for us as much as he would have liked and as much as we would have liked."