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LSG mentor Zaheer Khan took a dig at the Lucknow pitch claiming it should be suiting them rather than their opponents.
Zaheer Khan has taken a dig at the Lucknow pitch curator. (BCCI Photo)
Lucknow Super Giants mentor Zaheer Khan has taken a dig at the Ekana Cricket Stadium pith curator for preparing an unsuitable pitch for the home team. Zaheer feels that in IPL, teams tend to benefit from the home advantage, but it wasn’t the case for LSG as the pitch on which they suffered a heavy defeat to Punjab Kings on Tuesday night suited the visitors more.
LSG lost three wickets in the Powerplay before recovering to post 171 but PBKS sprinted to the target in just 16.2 overs.
“What was a little disappointing for me here, considering it’s a home game, and you know, in IPL you’ve seen how teams have looked at taking a little bit of home advantage, you know,” the legendary India pacer said during a post-match interaction with the media.
“So yeah, from that point of view, you’ve seen the curator is not really thinking that it’s a home game. You know, I think maybe it looked like it was Punjab curator out here,” he added.
Zaheer’s comments came after LSG captain Rishabh Pant admitted that the team is still trying to assess the home conditions.
“So, that’s (pitch) something which we’ll figure out. It’s a new setup also for me here. But I hope that this is the first and the last game when it comes to that, because you are disappointing the Lucknow fans as well,” Zahee said.
“They’ve come up with so much expectations of winning the first home game here. As a team, we are confident, you know, we accept that we’ve lost the game, and we’re going to do whatever it takes to make that impact in the home leg. We still have six more games to go here,” he added.
LSG have now lost two of their three games of the season and slipped to the sixth spot on the points table. However, Zaheer says they aren’t worried about the results as of now.
“This is the third game of the season, you know, so we’ve been very vocal about how the team is looking at this season. So, that’s something which is very important for us as a group. It’s a very process-oriented setup, not so much result-oriented,” he said.
“So, we’re going to definitely focus on the positives. Yes, there is some work to be done, which will happen in the due course,” he added.