‘Vizag is our second home for this tournament, not a neutral venue,’ says DC coach Ponting ahead of first ‘home game’ of IPL 2024

Visakhapatnam: After suffering two defeats in two matches, Delhi Capitals will look to turn things around when they take on the Chennai Super Kings in their first home match of the IPL 2024 at ACA–VDCA Cricket Stadium, here on Sunday.

Reflecting on the results so far, Delhi Capitals’ head coach Ricky Ponting said, “We had a couple of chats about our cricket and the consensus out of those meetings is that we have played some really good and bad cricket. So, we need to find somewhere in the middle where we can play consistently good cricket over 40 overs. We could have easily won both our first games, with Ishant going down in the first game didn’t really help and the other day we went for a few more runs in the bowling innings of that match.”

“However, we are very confident that we’re going to be able to turn things around against a good CSK team, but it’s just a matter of us playing our best cricket for 40 overs,” he added while addressing media during the pre-match press conference.

Speaking about the approach going forward in the tournament, Ponting said, “It’s not a short tournament, it’s quite a long tournament, but by saying that, you would prefer to get off to a good start than get off to a slow start. We have still got 12 games to play. I’m pretty sure we’ll have a more positive intent going into this game, we’ll be a lot more aggressive in this game than we’ve been in the first couple of games, and I think if we take the right attitude into this game then we can definitely win.”

Asked about playing two home matches in Visakhapatnam, the former Australia captain said, “This is our second home for this tournament, this is not a neutral venue by any chance.”

“We have got our first two games here and we want to make sure that this is a place that we can win,” he concluded.

–IANS