After Mumbai Indians hunted down Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s (RCB) daunting target of 197 with more than four overs to spare, losing skipper Faf du Plessis candidly admitted that his team did not have the arsenal in their bowling attack to win games. As a result, du Plessis said, RCB’s batters will have to punch above their weight to get to scores of over 220 for the side to recover from their five losses in six games in IPL 2024.

“At the moment, it feels like, from a batting perspective we have to get and try and push for 220 to have a chance. From a bowling perspective, we don’t have as many weapons. So unfortunately it comes down to the batters to make sure that we use our form and our confidence. The scores that we put on the board are probably going to be the only way we are going to get into the competition,” the South African said.

On Thursday, RCB used as many as six bowlers, with all leaking runs at 12.84 per over. Their most economical bowler Vijaykumar Vyshak bowled his three overs for 10.66 while Akash Deep was the most expensive at 15.71. Du Plessis conceded that their bowling lacked the spark this season, and to compensate for that, the batters will have to step up.

“From a bowling perspective, we have lacked a little bit of penetration (at the start) so we have to go out and find creative ways within our squad we can get a team two or three-down in the powerplay. Just so that you feel like your bowling innings can start on the front foot. It feels, for the last few games, that we are on the back foot after the first few overs,” he said.

Despite putting up a mammoth 196 for 8 on the board, RCB never looked in command during the second innings, especially after the MI opening pair of Ishan Kishan and Rohit Sharma gave the home team a sound 101-run opening stand in mere 8.5 overs. Later Suryakumar Yadav rubbed salt to their wounds by belting a fiery 19-ball 52 to leave the visiting bowlers searching for cover.

Du Plessis felt that the MI batters also benefited from the evening dew at the Wankhede, and there was no room for error from the already weak bowling side.

“You also have to give credit in the way that the boys from MI came out and played. Put a lot of pressure on our bowlers. Made our bowlers make a lot of mistakes in the powerplay especially. You could see that anyone who came in could find the middle of the bat quite easily. We did know that and spoke about it in the first innings. The dew here looked like it was going to be big so we felt we needed to get 215, maybe even 220. Obviously, 190 (196) or whatever we got wasn’t enough runs,” he said.

“It (dew) is a big thing in some venues as we know. When the dew settles in, it is really tough. You could see the boys were bowling a few full tosses. We changed the ball a few times. It was really, really wet. But that’s just the game of cricket. It is probably the only sport where the conditions have such a big impact.”

With the IPL rapidly approaching the mid-way stages, the RCB team will have to regroup and can’t afford any more slip-ups as they are currently languishing at the ninth place in the IPL points table with the second-poorest net run-rate of -1.124 after Delhi Capitals.

Du Plessis’ side will next take on the Sunrisers Hyderabad at home on April 15, where they will look to avoid five straight defeats.