Bitterly disappointing to stomach the loss

Bitterly disappointing to stomach the loss Brendon McCullum, Friday, April 24, 2009 After the drama and heartbreak of last night, our biggest challenge will be to look ahead and ready ourselves for the game against the Chennai Super Kings tomorrow. That's easier said than done, and many of us will be replaying that game in their minds today. Such was the tension, stress, and disappointment that we decided to take a half-day off to regroup and recharge our batteries. We have been playing and will be playing on every alternate day till May 5th, which makes recovery time hard to find. If we saw amazing, desperate cricket yesterday against Rajasthan Royals, expect more of the same tomorrow. Both KKR and Chennai are in the same boat, with one win in three games. They have been a little up and down with their bowling, but as the opposition, our main task will be to restrict their batting line-up. It's got Matthew Hayden at the top who is hitting them like he did a few years ago, followed by Suresh Raina, MS Dhoni, Jacob Oram and Andrew Flintoff. Hopefully we will be able to break through the openers early, but with such strong batting down the order, we will have to put in a top-notch bowling performance. It is also important that we up our fielding effort a little. We learnt yesterday the hard way, every run counts, so I would expect a few diving bodies on show tomorrow. The tournament has been unlucky with the weather so far, and curiously, it has been sunny on the days between games. We have got good weather today and hopefully tomorrow will be the same. It's not easy to bring myself to talk about yesterday's game, but I must applaud the way Sourav Ganguly batted. Gayle was in tremendous touch, but it was Sourav who built up a fantastic chase towards the end, with a very good partnership with young Yashpal Singh. Sadly, the script went horribly wrong in the last three balls, and it was as though a win was stolen from us. Coming into the last over, we were in a good position but things went awry, and finally it was a tie. As far as the super over was concerned, we garnered a decent 15 runs, which might have been hard to chase down if the mis-hit from Yusuf Pathan off the second ball from Ajantha Mendis had gone to hand. I still think Mendy on another day might have pulled it off for us. He is a courageous, calm guy and was eager for the challenge of bowling that over – unfortunately for all of us, it was not his day.

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