Sunrisers Hyderabad depend heavily on their top four batters to fire and in an IPL match against Kolkata Knight Riders on Sunday, they were all out for 165.
Abhishek Sharma was out for 15, while Travis Head and Ishan Kishan scored 61 and 42 respectively, but the middle-order batters including Heinrich Klaasen (11) failed to build momentum for a big total.
SRH coach Daniel Vettori too admitted that losing wickets at the crucial stages of the innings really hurt their chances to put up a competitive total on the board. Chasing a modest target of 165, KKR were home in 18.2 overs with Ajinkya Rahane (43) and Angkrish Raghuvanshi (59) anchoring the chase.
“We got off to a great start but couldn’t capitalise on that, lost some wickets at crucial times. 160 is incredibly difficult to defend even if the wicket was a bit slow. But we had enough fight after the powerplay to give a small chance. But they managed to chase really well,” Vettori said in the post-match press conference.
Vettori said constant fall of wickets in the middle overs made it hard for his side to regain momentum despite having a great start.
“We just lost wickets in crucial times and in T20 games even if you have momentum, if the opposition goes hard it’s really hard to regain the momentum.
“The wickets of Travis Head, Ishan, Klaasen…had any of them continued it would have been different but KKR bowled really well. The (KKR) spinners found their length really well in particular.”
Varun Chakravarthy (3/36) and Sunil Narine (2/31) were the star performers with the ball for KKR.
“Chakravarthy was able to take wickets even if we put him under pressure early on,” Vettori said.
