Mo Bobat, the director of cricket for Royal Challengers Bengaluru, stated on Saturday that the team will “honestly review” the close six-wicket loss to Delhi Capitals but won’t “over-analyze” the outcome.
The Royal Challengers suffered their second IPL 2026 loss as their batsmen put up a pretty lackluster 175/6 in Bengaluru.
“Yeah, we probably weren’t as fluent as we normally are. Obviously, we’ve been a pretty strong batting unit so far in the games gone. I wouldn’t over-analyse that too much. We’ll review honestly like we always do,” PTI quoted Bobat as saying in the post-match press conference.
“We’ll always consider things that we did well and things that we could improve. Ultimately, we’ve been batting very well through this competition. So, we’ll take some learning from this game and then we’ll try and get back into our normal groove in the next one,” he added.
Bobat openly acknowledged that the RCB batters were unable to overcome a sticky Chinnaswamy pitch.
“A couple of games on the pitch have been quite low and slow. So, we certainly found in the first innings today, it was a very slow surface, it wasn’t coming on to the bat at all.
“So, look, it has been a little bit varied. But at the end of the day, our boys have got to figure things out there. They have to assess conditions and they have to put on a score. And we weren’t quite able to do that today,” he said.
According to Bobat, RCB took a calculated gamble by benching key bowlers like Josh Hazlewood and Bhuvneshwar Kumar, leaving a part-time player like Romario Shepherd to defend 15 runs off the final over against two skilled finishers, David Miller and Tristan Stubbs.
“Yeah, so there comes a point in the game where you feel like you’re behind in the game. So, to get yourself back in that game or maybe even get ahead of the game, you have to use your champion bowlers. So we felt that we had to bowl both Hazlewood and Bhuvi when we did to make it as difficult as possible later in the game.
“Obviously, that involves a bit of a risk. It’s a tough ask for Romario bowling that last over to two international batters and two international finishers. So it was always going to be a tough ask. But we had to take the game as deep as possible,” he detailed.
