Daniel Vettori hoping for a speedy recovery of AB de Villiers

The Royal Challengers Bangalore is a very relieved camp at the moment. Daniel Vettori, the head coach, is quite pleased with the performance too. After having lost 3 matches this season, RCB finally got back to winning ways against the Gujarat Lions. They registered their second win of the season. However, they had a slight hiccup prior to the match. Their star batsman AB de Villiers was ruled out of the match due to an injury.

This had only added to the existing list of injured players that had ruled Tymal Mills and Samuel Badree out as well. Daniel Vettori now hopes that all the players get back to their fitness for the next fixture. The team is lucky not to have a match until the next Sunday. RCB’s next encounter will be against the Kolkata Knight Riders on April 23. The injured bench has a lot of time at hand to get back to fitness.

Vettori also had a word of praise for Chris Gayle who scored 77 in the previous game. In the meantime, the coach is happy with the fact that the likes of Adam Milne and Travis Head have put their hands up and chipped in with key contributions.

“Chris [Gayle] is at his strongest and most powerful on these good wickets and can take any bowling attack down. We had to go through the ringer – Sam Badree was injured today, Tymal’s [Mills] injured, obviously AB [de Villiers] is injured as well. So to have the likes of Chris, Travis [Head], Adam [Milne] and Shane [Watson] to call on in these situations makes a huge difference. When we went to the auction process, we wanted to increase our bench strength and fortunately today it’s come through for us,” said Daniel Vettori.

“We’re fortunate that we don’t play until the 23rd, so that’ll allow us to have some recovery time. We’re hopeful that AB is fit for that, we’re hopeful that Sam’s fit for that, we’re hopeful that Tymal is fit for that. So they do have an extended period of time before we play again. We’re reasonably confident that they’ll be available to play. But it’s good that Chris and Travis stood up today, which means we have more selection dilemmas,” the RCB coach added further.

Young leggie Yuzvendra Chahal was exceptional with the ball on the day against Gujarat Lions. He had scalped three key wickets of Dwayne Smith, Brendon McCullum and Suresh Raina on the day. Daniel Vettori looked very impressed with him. He noted that ever since he had first seen him in the Champions League final for the Mumbai Indians.

“I’ve been lucky enough to work with Yuzi [Yuzvendra Chahal] for the last four years and also play against him when he was with the Mumbai Indians. The way he bowled in the Champions League final four years ago was the reason we wanted to get him into RCB,” conceded Vettori.