Lucknow Super Giants ended their hot and cold IPL 2024 season with a deserving win over Mumbai Indians at Wankhede Stadium on Friday. It was not enough for KL Rahul's side to confirm a playoff spot as they finished the season in the sixth position.
After leading the team to playoffs in 2022 and 2024, KL Rahul started the season with three wins in their first four matches and also spent the majority of the first half of the season in the top four. However, Lucknow struggled for consistency after their playing combination took various injury blows.
KL Rahul top-scored with 520 runs in 14 innings but his strike rate of 136.12 was hard to ignore. When asked the reason behind LSG not making to playoffs this season, Rahul cited injury reasons and also added a lack of collective effort.
"At the beginning of the season, I really felt that we had a strong team and had most bases covered," Rahul said during the post-match presentation. "[We had] a couple of injuries obviously, which happens every season to every team, but those injuries and the guys that went away really dented us a little bit, and we didn't play well enough collectively. When the bowlers had a good game, the batters wouldn't have a good game. We just didn't come together as much as we would have wanted to."
Meanwhile, team head coach Justin Langer also pointed out injury reasons and also highlighted their poor fielding efforts throughout the season.
"I saw a stat today that we've dropped a lot of catches," Langer said. "We've probably got the best fielding coach in the world, Jonty Rhodes, and we dropped some catches. And often it's something as simple as that to decide the outcome of the season. We missed Mayank, he was huge. Mohsin Khan had quite a sore back for some of the tournament. But I think dropped catches is the thing that really killed us in the end."
