Ricky Ponting blasts Virat Kohli and Co for RCB’s horror show in IPL 2017

Ricky Ponting has criticized the Royal Challengers Bangalore trio of Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers and Chris Gayle for their team’s lacklustre performance in IPL 2017.

Former Australia skipper Ricky Ponting blamed Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers and Chris Gayle for Royal Challengers Bangalore’s abysmal performance in the Indian Premier League this season.

Virat Kohli’s form has been quite disappointing for Royal Challengers Bangalore in this year’s IPL. (BCCI)

Kohli & Co are languishing at the bottom of the points table, managing just two wins out of their 13 games. A match against Sunrisers Hyderabad was washed out.

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“Their big name players just aren’t standing up like they did last year,” Ponting said to cricket.com.au. “They got on an amazing roll at the back end of last year’s tournament when Kohli was playing out of his skin, de Villiers was playing well, Gayle was chipping in and Watson was doing a good job with bat and ball.”

“But so far Kohli has done next to nothing, there’s been flashes in the pan from Gayle and AB de Villiers, but the consistency just hasn’t been there,” added Ponting.

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“Watson’s the other one who hasn’t had that consistency and match-winning performances this season that he’s had in previous seasons. And he’s been in and out of the side and up and down the batting order to a degree. They’ve got some issues there.”

Ponting felt RCB were always overreliant on the batting trio of Kohli, Gayle and ABD. “Quite often those few have been quite consistent and been good enough to win quite a lot of games for them. But this season it just hasn’t panned out that way,” he said.