Apart from a defeat against Rajasthan Royals in their previous game, Punjab Kings were hit with a major controversy after Sam Curran walked down to the toss after Shikhar Dhawan missed the game.
After seeing Sam Curran alongside Sanju Samson social media erupted in controversy as the franchise had earlier suggested that Jitesh Sharma was their vice-captain, by sending him for the pre-season captains’ photoshoot.
Following the move, Punjab Kings(PBKS) faced tons of criticism on social media. As the controversy grew higher on social media, Punjab Kings coach Sanjay Bangar came forward and gave a clarification for the issue.
“Jitesh wasn’t the designated vice-captain. The impression could have been because he attended the captain’s seminar or meeting at the start of the tournament.
But the thought was always that since Sam had led the team last year as well, he was late to arrive from the UK and wanted to have a few sessions, which is why we couldn’t send him to Chennai for the inauguration of the season.
Hence, Jitesh was sent because the directive from an IPL member was that a player must attend, but it was never in mind that he would be the vice-captain. But we were very clear in our minds that of at all there would be an opening it would be Sam to lead the team,” Bangar said.
After leading the team to register a 3-wicket defeat against RR, PBKS stand-in skipper Curran admitted that the win was hard to take.
“The wicket was slightly slow, but we didn’t start well with the bat and didn’t finish well in the end. It was a good effort from the lower order, getting (close) to 150 was excellent, the bowling was good, we kept them down, unfortunately, another close loss.
We stuck to our plans, bowled and fielded well, but I’m confident we’ll bounce back in the next game.
Three games is a hard way to fully work out the conditions (at the new venue), but we’ve adapted well, we won the first match and lost two matches by close margins (by 2 runs and 3 wickets), hard to take, but the boys will be lifted by how well we’ve played in the last couple of games,” he said.
Punjab Kings will play their next game of the season against Mumbai Indians on April 18 in Maharaja Yadavindra Singh International Cricket Stadium, Mullanpur, Chandigarh.
