Anil Kumble
There's no question, this next one on Saturday against the Deccan Chargers and the King's XI Punjab at home are must-win games for us. It'll be quite a challenge coming into a situation like this — from hereon, we have to try and win everything to creep up the ladder and be the fourth team in the semis.
I'm playing tomorrow, I'm much better, the groin is holding up, so I'm hoping to get a good game. Obviously, I haven't done much bowling but am confident of doing well. What will also hopefully make a difference for us is Misbah coming in. He's played a lot of Twenty20, so he brings in a lot of experience in these conditions.
As for our opponents on the morrow, Hyderabad has explosive batsmen, so it's important to strike early and get wickets. Gilchrist, Gibbs and Afridi, these three guys are obviously the key. Rohit Sharma's batting really well but I think if we get that explosive trio early, have Dale Steyn strike with the new ball, it'll be great. It's an early start as well and there won't be much seam movement, I think it'll be a good contest.
In a must win game, especially one of 20 overs, you need to go out there and play as freely as you can, you can't be half-hearted in your approach. Our strength is that all our guys are experienced, not in T20, but in must-win games. We have the quality, it's really just a matter of that one game which will give us the confidence to feel good about ourselves as a team. In the last two games, maybe the opposition got 20 extra runs. That's something we will be aware of when we bowl. Those extra runs from the fifth bowler cost us the game. With me being fit, we'll hopefully be able to sustain that pressure right through, with five bowlers. It's important we get back to back wins at home and pay back the faith the home fans and the people backing us so strongly have put in us. We're determined to do that.
What we need to do is get the momentum, something that hasn't happened so far. Either we have not got the momentum at all or broken it while batting. We were cruising against Chennai when Taylor and Kallis both got out in the same over.
Even against Delhi, they just got off to a great start and the two lefties (Gambhir and Dhawan) took it away. Then we came back and lost momentum. We've done well in patches but as a batting unit, it's also important for us to get some big overs and we haven't done that. Again, as bowlers, we need to keep on the pressure. Look at the Chennai game, Dhoni got some 45 runs off the last two overs, even if we had given away 25 or 30, we would've won. We lost by 10 runs.
T20's a batsman's game like I said, but there's no reason we can't back it with our bowling, which, on paper, is very strong and has lots of variety. Zak is left arm, Praveen swings the ball, Steyn is very quick, Kallis pretty good and I'm there too. Basically, we need to back ourselves to win. I hope we'll pull this off today.
(Hawkeye/Chivach)