IPL 2021: In IPL 2021, RCB suffered a humiliating nine-wicket defeat at the hands of KKR yesterday. Before this match, Kohli had announced to quit the captaincy of Bangalore after the second phase of the IPL. Many are also linking RCB's defeat of yesterday's match to Virat's decision of quitting the captaincy. However RCB's head coach Mike Hesson has called all such assumptions 'baseless'. He said the defeat in yesterday's match has nothing to do with Virat's decision to quit the captaincy.
Hesson said Virat's decision has no affect whatsoever on the team's performance against KKR in any way. "No, I don't believe so," he said at the post-match press conference. It is important to quickly do away with anything that diverts your attention. So we talked about making an announcement at the earliest and all the players were aware of it."
Mike Hesson said, "Virat's decision to quit the captaincy really had no impact on the team's performance today. We didn't bat as we should have. We did not adjust according to the conditions and lost wickets consistently. In this match we did nothing that should have been done as one batting unit."
At the same time, he said, "But I still trust this team and we will soon perform better." Kohli prior to two days of announcing to quit RCB's captaincy had also announced to quit India's captaincy after next month's T20 World Cup in that format as well.
Kolkata Knight Riders playing XI: Shubman Gill, Venkatesh Iyer, Nitish Rana, Rahul Tripathi, Eoin Morgan (c), Andre Russell, Dinesh Karthik (wk), Sunil Narine, Lockie Ferguson, Varun Chakravarthy, Prasidh Krishna
Royal Challengers Bangalore playing XI: Virat Kohli (c), Devdutt Padikkal, Srikar Bharat (wk), Glenn Maxwell, AB de Villiers, Wanindu Hasaranga, Sachin Baby, Kyle Jamieson, Mohammed Siraj, Harshal Patel, Yuzvendra Chahal