Punjab Kings batsman Shashank Singh during the IPL T20 cricket match against SRH at the Maharaja Yadavindra Singh Cricket Stadium in Mullanpur, Punjab on April 09, 2024.
| Photo Credit: R V Moorthy
Punjab Kings’ Shashank Singh on Tuesday stressed on the importance of self-belief for a batter and said that he and his partner Ashutosh Sharma believed until the penultimate ball that they’ll take their team home versus Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH).
Chasing 283, Kings lost the match by just two runs. When Shashank and Ashutosh came together, 69 runs were needed off 27 balls.
“We have to give credit to Ashutosh for this – the way he batted in the last over (With 29 runs needed, Kings scored 26). We both believed till the second last ball (10 were needed) that it’s possible. We were talking in gestures that it’s possible,” he said at the post-match press conference here.
Saying that his middle-order role “is to take the game as deep as possible,” Shashank added that he and Ashutosh had belief instilled in them from batting in similar match scenarios in the pre-season camp.
“We did a lot of match simulations. We had a camp before the IPL started. We used to bat at Nos. 5, 6, and 7. We were given a lot of scenarios – 60 runs from 5 overs, 70 from 5… We chased down those a lot of times. We had a lot of belief.”