Fleming furious over ‘poor’ Pune effort
Rising Pune Supergiants coach Stephen Fleming was distinctly annoyed after his side's defeat to Kolkata Knight Riders in the IPL on the weekend, lambasting his team's performance as 'very poor'.
Pune, who were heavily favoured in the cricket betting odds and boast a star-studded line up that includes MS Dhoni and Steve Smith, have lost four out of five matches so far and are second from bottom on the table. They lost by two wickets.
Pune made a decent score of 160 for five, very good on the wicket, but poor death bowling saw them unable to defend it and lost with three balls to go. Fleming felt they should have easily defended that score.
He said after the match: "We are not playing winning cricket and that's all matters. I thought today's performance was poor, performance in the field was I thought very poor.
"160 was a good to very good score on this surface. We saw there was a lot of assistance for the slow bowlers, but we still did not adjust. We did not use that spin to create enough pressure.
"We kept Kolkata in the game. They hit well at crucial times, but our fielding and the bowling… the slow bowling in particular towards the middle overs was left wanting and that is disappointing. 161 was easily defendable."
He conceded that he was not feeling much love for his team at the moment, but did admit that as a new team they needed a bit more time to gel: "I was pretty angry with the way things went today so my morale needs a bit of boost.
"I've been in the IPL long enough to know that we have to sleep on it, tomorrow we've got to travel down and then we are back into it.
"So it's becoming pretty clear that whilst we don't want to put the onus on getting victories, we have to get victories. We're using up all those free lives. Even the last two games, we have a good chance of winning.
"We've just got to move on but there's no doubt as a new team, trying to develop some culture and some camaraderie, but it does take a little bit of work."
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