Follow UsSunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) once again failed to read the conditions and suffered their sixth defeat of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2025. Against Mumbai Indians (MI) in Hyderabad on April 23 (Wednesday), SRH once again tried to be ultra-aggressive from the word go and ended up losing five wickets with just 35 runs on the board.
There was enough movement on offer in Hyderabad, and MI’s new-ball pair Trent Boult and Deepak Chahar took four wickets between them in less than five overs. There was a bit of recovery from Heinrich Klaasen (71 off 44) and Abhinav Manohar (43 off 37), but SRH could only get to a below-par total of 143/8, which MI chased down in just 15.4 overs.
Talking about SRH’s batting approach, head coach Daniel Vettori said: "I think obviously, the toss was important. We wanted to bowl first because the conditions were vastly different, (it was a different) wicket to the previous ones. I mean, we've discussed that it's a 280, 250 wicket. So, conditions changed dramatically. So, to be able to get that assessment early, around what a par score was, is obviously difficult.
"When you go in there early on, you're trying to obviously maximise that power play. And unfortunately, we weren't able to, and we kept losing wickets. Once we realised that the surface wasn't what we anticipated, then we needed to build towards that sort of 180 score. That, unfortunately, is difficult to do when you're 24 for four after the power play.
"Once we got through that, maybe two overs, the assessment was that it was not the 250-260 wicket that this has been the last couple of games. And we obviously went out of depth. I mean, the dismissal of Ishan is obviously disappointing and that puts pressure on everyone coming in.
"When you're in a powerplay situation, you still want to try and maximise those two fielders out. So there's still some emphasis or onus on the batsmen that are there to try and score some runs. And today was very unfortunate that they couldn't get it done.
"Understanding what a good score is, what a par score is and being able to set that up. Travis and Abhi (Abhishek Sharma), when they go, they're very aggressive and they take the game on and it's led to a lot of success for us. When they don't succeed, then it's the responsibility of the other batsmen. And potentially that's what we haven't had this season, around the ability for partnerships, for one or two guys to step up in games. We got two today, but it was just a little bit too late for us.”
SRH are currently at No.9 on the IPL 2025 points table. The Sunrisers now need to win all their remaining six games to qualify for the playoffs, something that RCB did in the IPL 2024. "IPL has been going a long time and there's been a lot of teams find themselves in this situation. And there's been a few teams that have been able to resurrect their seasons. And you look back to RCB last year after a difficult start. So if we can take some inspiration, it's from a team like them.
"Mumbai has done it on a few occasions, but ultimately it's going to take one performance. And we just haven't been able to put a collective performance together, bar the two games that we've won. So we're going to have to improve dramatically in all three facets."