Gujarat Titans batter Glenn Phillips acknowledged that his team suffered greatly in the devastating 92-run loss to Royal Challengers Bengaluru in IPL Qualifier 1 due to scoreboard pressure and careless fielding, but he maintained that the team would swiftly move on and put things right before Friday’s Qualifier 2 match.
After RCB reached 254 for five thanks to Rajat Patidar’s brilliant, undefeated 93, GT collapsed to 162 all out as their top order was unable to handle the increasing pressure.
Phillips, who did not play in the game, claimed that after RCB’s early ball strikes, the target got harder.
“250 any day is a tough ask to chase without everything going your way. There’s obviously a huge amount of scoreboard pressure when you’re trying to chase 250 and very few teams have done it,” PTI quoted Phillips as saying after the match in Dharamsala on Tuesday.
“We went out there and gave it everything. Unfortunately, when you’re trying to chase 250, everything has to go right and obviously it didn’t,” he added.
Despite the enormous first-innings score, Phillips believed that batting was still possible on the surface.
“It obviously produced plenty of runs for Rajat and a couple of the other boys in the RCB side. But as Rahul (Tewatiya) showed as well, it was still good enough to bat on in the second innings,” he said.
The New Zealander also cited the Gujarat Titans’ subpar fielding performance—which included a costly missed opportunity off Patidar—as the game’s deciding factor. At the time, he was on 20.
“Especially in playoff games, fielding becomes really crucial. You can bowl well and bat well, but if you field badly, you’re still going to lose. Rajat made us pay big time today. You can’t win games if you can’t take catches,” he said.
But according to Phillips, the problem was less with talent execution in the field and more with mindset.
“It’s probably more of an attitudinal shift than anything else from a fielding perspective, making sure that we want the ball and want to do something special,” he said.
Phillips stated that GT is fortunate to have another chance through the playoffs format despite the crushing loss and encouraged the team to bounce back fast.
“Sometimes a loss like this is probably easier to get over. If you lose by one or two runs, you keep thinking about one moment here or there. But when you get nowhere near, you can just go, ‘we were just not on it today’. That doesn’t mean we won’t be on it in the next game,” he said.
The devastating loss, according to Phillips, is a result of the “fickle nature” of Twenty20 cricket, when a team’s bad days may add up to a one-sided outcome.
“If each individual happens to have a bad day, that accumulates to one really bad day for the team. And that can easily switch around to every individual having a great day in the next game,” he said.
The victor of the Eliminator match between Sunrisers Hyderabad and Rajasthan Royals will face GT in the Qualifier 2 encounter.
