Punjab Kings’ hopes of reaching the playoffs suffered a blow with its defeat against Chennai Super Kings, but Harshal Patel is still optimistic.

Reeling at eighth spot with as many points from eleven games, things look quite daunting for the Punjab outfit, but Harshal believes that it’s important to play good cricket in the remaining three games.

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“In my 13 years of playing IPL, I have never seen teams out of the race or qualifying before 13 or 14 games are over. So, we are still in that race, and as a team we know that when we play high-quality cricket and if everyone does their job, we can beat any team on any ground,” Harshal said.

After its bowlers restricted CSK to 167 for 9, the Kings lost two quick wickets. But a 53-run stand by Prabhsimran Singh and Shashank Singh reignited hopes before CSK bowlers bounced back.

“Even with that opening spell (by Tushar Deshpande), we were still in the game when Prabh and Shashank were batting. We had two early jolts, but at the same time the way Shashank and Prabh recovered from that situation in the Powerplay, we were quite settled at that point. If we had made a few better choices in terms of which bowlers to target, we would have probably been closer to the game,” Harshal said.

Ahead of its next game against Royal Challengers Bengaluru on Thursday, Harshal hopes to learn a few lessons from the outing against CSK. “Coming into this game, we thought it would be a high-scoring venue because of the size of the boundaries and usually the ground offers some pace and bounce. But it wasn’t like that, especially today,” he said.

“The next game will be a night fixture, it might be a bit different and we might see 30-40 runs more on this surface. The lessons that we have learned is that if you bowl hard length into the stumps and keep stumps in play at all times, there’s reward for the bowlers and shot-making is sort of difficult from that length…”