After suffering a seven-wicket loss against Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) in the Indian Premier League (IPL), SunRisers Hyderabad (SRH) skipper David Warner took the blame on himself for not batting out the overs and ensuring a safe total for his side. His remark came as KKR defeated SunRisers Hyderabad by seven wickets at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi on Saturday. The Dinesh Karthik-led side chased down a total of 143 with 12 balls to spare. For KKR, Gill and Eoin Morgan remained unbeaten on 70 and 42 respectively.

KKR restricted SunRisers to just 142/4 in the allotted 20 overs as all the bowlers displayed clinical performances. Pat Cummins was the standout bowler for KKR as he ended with figures of 1/19 from his quota of four overs.

“In the match against KKR, I and Jonny got ourselves in and we backed ourselves to play the way we wanted to play, unfortunately through the middle, we could have gone probably a little harder, we could have taken few more risks. It was a very soft and poor dismissal from myself, my dismissal happened when we were looking to change the gears, I don’t blame anyone and I take full responsibility for not batting out the overs,” said Warner while replying to an ANI query during a virtual press conference.

Warner managed to score 36 runs from 30 balls and he was dismissed in the 10th over by Varun Chakravarthy. After his dismissal, Manish Pandey and Wriddhiman Saha found the going tough and the duo was unable to score runs at a brisk pace. Pandey scored 51 runs and his innings helped SRH past the 140-run mark.

“I don’t know where it wrong, we just cannot be having two batsmen on the bench, we could have gone a little bit harder through the middle, we played four-five overs for 20 runs after my dismissal, we need to apply little more pressure on the bowlers and we need to try to hit more boundaries. I am more disappointed with the number of dot balls we played, there were 35-36 dot balls and in T20 cricket, it is not acceptable.

“You have to put a genuine batsman, it’s easy to say send a pinch-hitter, at this stage with myself getting out, we had to send one genuine batsman (Saha), KKR bowlers bowled well,” he added.

In this year’s IPL, all the captains so far have won the toss and chosen to field first. But, Warner decided to break the trend as he opted to bat first after winning the toss against KKR.

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Talking about his decision to bat first, Warner said: “We have batted first before with dew in India, it’s about putting runs on the board, in the end, we were 20-30 runs short, if we had more it probably would have been a good game. At the end of the day, if you don’t put the right total on the board, it will be very hard. There have been instances in the past where we have defended 130 or less.”

SunRisers Hyderabad will next face Delhi Capitals on September 29 at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi.