Rahul Dravid reveals the reason for DD coming 6th in the IPL Group Stage

Delhi Daredevils have been the most ‘India Centric’ team this season, investing a lot in the domestic players and putting more focus in the ‘process’ than in the ‘result’ to help nurture the next generation of Indian cricketers.

It’s a trade-off that the Daredevils had opted for, as you can not expect young Indian kids to compete and win against International superstars. But Dravid doesn’t attribute DD’s look to that, instead he feels that the youngsters could have pulled Delhi through, if not for the close losses that they suffered.

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“I think if you look at the last couple of years, I feel from the two years before that, we have shown some improvement and we have looked to go in the right direction but it’s not been enough,”

“You need eight wins to qualify in this tournament, we got seven last year, six this year and I think the close games we lost probably cost us. That’s the nature of the tournament, there are some good teams and you need to win those games, there were probably seven or eight games that were close and we probably won only two of them, five or six we lost and you can’t afford to lose that many. You need to get in the right side of the result of a few of them and we couldn’t. Obviously, it is a little bit disappointing but there were positives as well right through the season,” Dravid said

JP Duminy’s and QDK’s loss due to injury caused a lot of commotion in the Delhi batting unit, as they were left with just inexperienced Indian batters in the top oder.

“We lost (Quinton) De Kock and JP (Duminy) before the tournament and as a result, our batting line-up was quite inexperienced when compared to other teams. They are really good players of this format and it was too late for us to find good replacements for them.”

Dravid heaped praise on the youngsters and said that they could win big for the country if they channelised their energies in the right way.

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Utkarsh Bhatla