“Let’s not take away anything from Cameron Green,” Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) captain Ajinkya Rahane said at the end of his team’s latest IPL 2026 loss, this one to Gujarat Titans (GT).
It needed to be said. Because Green has been under a lot of scrutiny. Big pay day, little to no returns. But on Friday night in Ahmedabad, he gave it all that he could. From No. 4, he scored 79 in 55 balls. It was the sort of innings – he scored just four runs at the death in 11 balls – that rarely wins an IPL match, and it didn’t, but it signalled a bit of something, for KKR and for Green.
“The kind of innings he has played has been amazing when we were three wickets down [for 32 after four overs], with a counter-attack,” Rahane said at the post-match press conference. “He took his time. It’s never easy. When things are not going your way as a team, and individually you are under pressure. But the courage which he has shown was fantastic. Credit to him, these things can happen, you can lose wickets, but we reached 180 because of Cameron Green’s effort.”
That the innings came after Green had totalled 56 runs in five innings, after having joined KKR with a INR 25.20 crore price tag (though IPL rules allowed him to be paid only INR 18 crore), made it that much more significant. What continued to be a worry were his periodic slowdowns. He was on 8 from 14 balls after the eighth over, and KKR were going nowhere at 59 for 3. His scoring rate passed 100 only in the 12th over when he hit Rashid Khan for a six and a four. And though he scored quickly for a while, KKR still ended with a below-par score, and that was down to Green slowing down towards the end.
Ambati Rayudu was critical – of Green’s effort with the bat and the lack of communication between him and his batting partners.
“He could have just used the pace a little more, he was trying to force the ball, trying to drive on the up,” Rayudu said on ESPNcricinfo’s TimeOut show. “When you know that the ball was moving a bit, maybe he could have played more off the back foot, maybe played through point, covers, used the pace more.
“Batting has to be in partnerships, even in T20 cricket. You cannot bat as an individual. When you have batting in partnerships and having that communication in the middle, that is when, you know, you tend to get through tough phases pretty easily. Because in this game, you have seen every batter batting individually. Like, he’s just been going after what he thinks he has to go after.
“No non-striker was coming and having a chat, saying that, okay, maybe we can take an over, maybe we can target [a bowler] in a certain area. So I think that communication is missing in that batting lineup.”
In the 16th and 17th overs, Green didn’t face a ball. In the 18th, he took a single off the first ball and didn’t get back the strike. He took a single again off the first ball of the 19th, got back the strike after the next ball as Kartik Tyagi was run out, then scored one run off the next four balls. He faced almost the entirety of the last over, from Rashid, but went 0, 0 and 1 to start with. He got back the strike after a leg-bye, which was followed by four byes, and then Green was dismissed off the last ball of a six-run over. KKR scored 23 runs off the last four overs.
“And maybe if that [communication] was there, I think his innings would have been far more efficient, especially towards the end,” Rayudu said. “Towards the end, it should have been him taking the strike in the last four overs. If you remember Mukul Chaudhary’s innings, you know, that’s a great template to follow when you’re playing with a tail-ender, when you play all the five balls, get a single. I mean, that’s not always easy to do, but at least try and get a single of the fourth ball. But at least play four balls in a row.”
