Royal Challengers Bangalore is the South Africa of the Indian Premier League. You can bet on them to choke in every season of the tournament. Despite being a very strong team on paper, they somehow manage to disappoint their fans every year.
At the beginning of every season, fans start believing that this is the season that will turn things around for them, and their team will bring home the cup. Even the official team slogan for RCB, which the fans use at every outing is, “E Sala Cup Namde” (This time, the cup is ours). But unfortunately, this has never come true.
At the helm is the Indian team captain and the best batsman across formats in International cricket, Virat Kohli. It’s strange how the most successful Test captain of India is not able to take his T20 franchise home.
What could be the reason behind RCB tanking every season? Is it the captain? Is it the pressure? Or is it the laid-back attitude? Let’s look at the possible reasons behind RCB not doing so well in the Indian Premier League.
Constant Chop and Change
If you look at two of the most successful teams in the IPL - Mumbai Indians and Chennai Super Kings - they have one thing in common which is that they don’t make too many changes in their team. No matter how good or bad their teams perform, they make sure that they don’t play with the basic ingredients of their success. Their core team remains the same, they just add or subtract to it.
This is where RCB goes wrong. Every season they try to build a new team from scratch. IPL is a tournament where players from different countries play together in one team.
Thus, everyone needs some time to settle into the new team culture and atmosphere. RCB doesn’t give that opportunity or time to any player.
If a player is not playing good, there’s a very high chance he will be dropped from the team before the next auctions. Any player, not matter how good a cricketer he is, needs that trust and assurance from the team management that he will not be judged by a season’s performance.
Poor Bowling Attack
RCB has never been a good bowling side. They have highly relied on their batsman to score big runs to win. And when their batsman have, the bowlers have never been able to defend that. Teams have easily chased 200 plus scores against RCB.
RCB’s issues in the last few years has been their death overs bowling. It has been so poor that teams have easily scored with a run rate of more than 9 runs per over against them in the last few overs.
Last season, in their second game, Kohli and team conceded 40 runs in the last three overs against Mumbai Indians where Hardik Pandya scored a quickfire 32.
No one has forgotten that unbelievable innings of Andre Russell against RCB last season. Kohli and his men were cruising to victory when Russell took charge against the RCB bowlers in the last few overs. He singlehandedly turned the match in KKR’s favour by hitting sixes at will.
Mohammed Siraj was under such pressure that he started bowling wides and no-balls. Ultimately, the umpire had to ban him from bowling because he bowled a beamer at Andre Russell.
Fans watched in disbelief as a clueless bowling line up was being thrashed by the opposition. In the end, Kohli himself had to admit that their death bowling needs improvement if they want to succeed in the tournament.
Over-Reliance on Kohli & De Villiers
It’s a mis-conception that RCB has always been a good batting side. Yes, they have had very good batsman in the past, like Chris Gayle, Yuvraj Singh and Shane Watson but even then they have been highly dependent on Virat and De Villiers.
Every time RCB has managed to score a big total, either one of them or both of them have scored big.
Whenever both of them have failed together, RCB has always ended up scoring a low total. If you look at Mumbai Indians or CSK, each and every batsman takes up the responsibility of scoring runs. They never rely on one or two players to score a big total. This helps them create pressure on the opposition.
Every team has to work hard against them because they don’t know which batsman will score on a given day. Whereas against RCB, every team knows that they just have to go through Kohli and De Villiers and they are halfway there.
IPL auctions are scheduled on Thursday, 19 December and RCB would be looking to build a strong bowling line up. They need good death over bowlers along with few all rounders who can take wickets and also chip in a few runs as finishers.
RCB Squad Retained
AB de Villiers, Devdutt Padikkal, Gurkeerat Singh, Moeen Ali, Mohammed Siraj, Navdeep Saini, Parthiv Patel, Pawan Negi, Shivam Dube, Umesh Yadav, Virat Kohli, Washington Sundar, Yuzvendra Chahal
Player Slots Left
12 (six domestic, six overseas)
Money Spent
Rs 57.10 cr
Purse Remaining
Rs 27.90 cr
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)