Sunrisers Hyderabad coach Tom Moody said his side lost against Kings XI Punjab because of their own fielding lapses and misfortune, rather than the brilliance of Glenn Maxwell.
Kings XI’s Maxwell scored 95 in 43 balls to lead his side to a 72-run win last night, but he was dropped on 11, and then caught of a no-ball on 62.
Moody was firm in his belief that his bowlers did a fantastic job, and said: “End of the day, we can talk about Maxwell as long as we like. He is a wonderful striker of the ball.
"He is in incredibly good form at the moment, but when he gets dropped on 11 and then gets caught on a no-ball, you know, he’s gonna hurt you [and] that’s what happened.
“The bottom line is we didn’t take our chances against a player that’s in white-hot form and we chased 40 more runs than we should have.
“The bowlers shouldn’t have done any more than what they did. We bowled, I thought, very well. We just missed our chances. I thought Karn Sharma bowled particularly well to Maxwell. We had our chance to take him and we didn’t, and we paid the price.”
In the same Sharma over in which Maxwell was dropped by David Warner, Darren Sammy completely lost track of a shot of Cheteshwar Pujara in the floodlights of the adjacent football stadium, and did not even attempt a catch.
“During the first 10 overs, the lights were on in the stadium next door, and it came straight out of the lights on the neighbouring stadium, and Sammy just totally lost it.
“Warner is a world-class fielder. I don’t think I have ever seen him drop an outfield catch. As we saw afterwards, he took two similar catches very simply. That’s the nature of the game. It doesn’t matter how good you are.
“At times, we all make errors. Unfortunately for us tonight, it was against the wrong batsman to make errors and we made three of them.”
Punjab captain George Bailey agreed with Moody, and also praised his star batsman.
“Maxi (Maxwell) certainly blew it away tonight, but what tonight showed is you need to take your catches, take your chances,” said Bailey.
“But what he did do is that he struck the ball really nicely on a wicket the rest of us found a little difficult to score on. It was hard to start, it was a little skiddy and holding up a little bit.”
