Following yet another early exit, Royal Challengers Bangalore captain Faf du Plessis expressed his disappointment with his team’s performance, recognizing that they were not among the strongest contenders in the competition and therefore did not deserve to advance to the semifinals.
RCB’s campaign came to an abrupt end once again as they suffered a crushing six-wicket loss against the Gujarat Titans on Sunday. The team’s inability to secure an IPL trophy has been a persistent theme throughout their 16 seasons in the tournament.
Even though Faf du Plessis was individually brilliant and was the leading run-scorer in the tournament, RCB’s overall performance fell short. Regrettably, the skipper’s efforts did not translate into the team’s overall success.
Faf du Plessis on RCB’s season
Du Plessis’ honest evaluation echoed the team’s acknowledgment that there are areas they need to work on in order to enhance their competitiveness and become stronger contenders in future seasons.
“I am so disappointed that our season ends there. If we take a hard look at ourselves, we’ll be honest in saying that we weren’t one of the best teams in the competition. We were lucky that there were some really good performances throughout the season but, as a whole (and) as a team, we probably don’t deserve to be in the semifinal, if you look at the period of 15-14 games,” Du Plessis said.
Had Royal Challengers Bangalore emerged victorious, it would have prevented Mumbai Indians from securing a playoff spot. However, Gujarat Titans, propelled by Shubman Gill‘s remarkable performance, successfully chased down the challenging target of 198 runs set by the home team, accomplishing the task with five balls remaining.
“It (defeat) still hurts. I mean, we tried really hard tonight (Sunday) and unfortunately just fell short. Looking at some real positives in the form of Maxi (Glenn Maxwell) this year, the partnerships we had between myself and Virat (Kohli)… a 50-run partnership in probably every game, the consistency was remarkable. (Pacer Mohammed) Siraj had a great campaign, so some really, really high positives and some areas in the game where we were consistently not great, I think,” Du Plessis added.
