IPL 2021: Kumar Sangakkara Urges Rajasthan Royals To Improve Their Overall Performance

Former Sri Lankan captain and the director of cricket at Rajasthan Royals, Kumar Sangakkara, has called for the inaugural champions to improve the overall quality of their game and match other teams in terms of intensity in order to perform consistently in IPL 2021.

Sangakkara’s comments came after Rajasthan Royals were mauled by a margin of ten wickets by the Virat Kohli-led Royal Challengers Bangalore in Mumbai on Thursday.

The Royals have now lost three out of their first four games and courtesy back-to-back thumping defeats, they are now reeling at the bottom in the points table.

While Kumar Sangakkara admitted that his team was completely outplayed by RCB, he pointed out the inconsistency in Rajasthan Royals’ performances and their inability to close out games despite them being in a winning position.

”It is the overall performance. You have to tie together good performances with bat and ball and field well too. We had a game that we nearly chased down, a game that we should have won quite easily and then were quite outplayed in the next two,” said Kumar Sangakkara in the post-match press conference on Thursday.

“Today we were completely outplayed by RCB. You can’t always have perfect games but we have to get a lot better at executing our game plan and get some confidence going. There are some good pitches out there, a lot of batsmen score runs and it is quite tough for the bowlers to match the totals and keep scores in check. We need to match the other sides in that intensity,” he said.

While Rajasthan Royals lost to Royal Challengers Bangalore by ten wickets, Kumar Sangakara pointed out that getting to 177 despite having lost their first four wickets for 45 was a brilliant achievement, something that showed the ability that the team has. He urged one of the top-4 to kick on and get a really big score.

“Today was a game of two halves, we struggled that first six to seven overs and the next overs after having lost a lot of wickets we still managed to get to 176 so you see that ability there, one of the top four need to get a big score,” he said.