IPL 2017: 5 things that went wrong for Royal Challengers Bangalore this season

#3 Fragile middle order

Apart from the heroics of Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers, their middle order batsmen came up with a few crucial knocks throughout the 2016 season. KL Rahul had a breakthrough IPL with the bat as he scored 397 runs in 12 innings at an average of over 44 and a strike-rate of 146.

Apart from him, the Indian uncapped players Sarfaraz Khan and Sachin Baby stood up whenever the team needed them.

This time, the team missed the services of Rahul and Sarfaraz due to injuries while Sachin failed to get going whenever he got a chance to bat. With De Villiers completely off-colour, the burden of scoring runs in the middle overs fell on the shoulders of Kedar Jadhav.

Jadhav has been RCB’s best batsman this season but the right-hander hardly got support from his fellow batsmen.

The likes of Shane Watson, Sachin Baby, Mandeep Singh, Stuart Binny etc. were highly inconsistent and that went on to hurt the team on many occasions. Maybe the team management should have tried Harpreet Singh Bhatia, who came in as a replacement for Sarfaraz, as the Madhya Pradesh batsman was in a purple patch in the Indian domestic season.