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Follow UsIPL 2023 has a strange connection with the previous season. In 2022, Gujarat Titans defied everyone’s feedback on their squad. Cited by many to finish somewhere in the bottom half of the table, they clinched the trophy.
The 2023 season has also observed a contrasting relationship between expectations and reality centered around a team. However, there is a slight difference. Unlike Gujarat, Sunrisers Hyderabad have moved in the wrong direction. A lot of good things were expected of them. Instead, they have been one of the major disappointments of this edition.
We don’t blame you for expecting good things from SRH this season. They had made significant changes to their team. A new look Orange Army was loaded with an efficient mix of international and Indian stars. Fresh faces, with recently established international cricketers, were the flavor of their unit.
You could sense balance, flexibility and firepower on paper when you went through their squad. Their skipper Aiden Markram had just won the maiden SA20 title leading their sister franchise - the Sunrisers Eastern Cape. There were multiple signs that the sun will rise for SRH again after two grim seasons. Also, everyone had a point to prove.
The only question mark, if you had to be cynical, was if their young stars will repeat their T20 success in the Indian Premier League. Even with those doubts materializing, you would expect them to finish in the top four, or stay competitive throughout the tournament.
Match 62, however, was another indication of how poor they have been this year, especially with the bat.
Despite an awry start, they were able to restrict Gujarat to 188. It was a chaseable total given the defending champions appeared well placed to notch up 220 runs on the board. By the end of the powerplay, they lost Markram (their skipper), Rahul Tripathi and Abhishek Sharma (their top two scorers in the previous season) and Anmolpreet Singh. Two more wickets fell in the seventh over.
“Still believed at half-time that we were in with a chance but with four wickets in the powerplay, we went down,” said Markram after the match.
Statistically speaking, they are the second most underperforming batting side in the tournament, occupying the second last spot on most metrics. Ideally, they should be thankful for Delhi’s appalling season that they are not the last. But beyond numbers, it might be Delhi thanking them for competing for ‘the worst side of the tournament’ title.
After 12 games in the season, none of their top four batters have 400 runs to their name in the season. Heinrich Klaasen, who missed the start of the tournament and has batted five out of his nine innings this season at six, is their highest run-scorer. That is enough to tell you the struggles of their top-order.
Locking horns with one of the best bowling line-ups of the season, they decided to drop Glenn Phillips. That is one of the many mistakes they have made with the bat. After 12 games, they still do not have a fixed batting order. They have tried five opening combinations, the most after Kolkata in the season.
For a long time, they were infatuated with the idea of making Harry Brook work. Despite possessing multiple candidates to open in their first-choice XI itself, they promoted Brook to open, a position where he had batted only thrice in 93 T20 innings before IPL 2023. Result: Having scored a century, the Yorkshireman has only 163 runs in nine innings at an average of 204 in the season.
SRH’s batting has been a tale of poor decision making, be it using their resources or shot-selection.
An accurate metric to judge any side, irrespective of the format, is to look at the difference between their batting and their bowling average. SRH are one of the five teams in the tournament with a greater bowling average (29.1) than the batting average (24.9).
Klaasen has been their only batter who has shown consistency and has done so in a more trickier role as a finisher.
On Monday night (May 15) again, Klaasen displayed there were no demons in the pitch. He carried the team from the embarrassing 49/6 to 154/9 in 20 overs, scoring 64 off 44 balls. The way his batting partners were changing, it was reminiscent of those one-man batting efforts that the Indian cricket fans were used to seeing from Sachin Tendulkar or Rahul Dravid.
For SRH this year, it has been Klaasen. And since he has not been promoted to top four means the game is mostly gone by the time he walks out to bat. Overall, among the 20 batters who have scored over 300 runs this IPL season, only Suryakumar Yadav and Glenn Maxwell have a strike-rate better than that of Klaasen.
While their bowling has not clicked in unison either, it is the batting aspect that is more frustrating. There is an incredible amount of potential getting wasted. Be it Tripathi at the top, Markram in the middle or Samad in the slog overs.
SRH finished last in 2021 and eighth in a competition of 10 in 2022. The grim days will continue. They are out of the race for the playoffs now. When teams are striving for the top two spot, Hyderabad are in a close battle with Delhi to escape the last spot again. Given things are going worse for them every match, they have a chance to snatch the wooden spoon.
