Hyderabad: Sunrisers Hyderabad went guns blazing on Wednesday night against Hardik Pandya-led Mumbai Indians. Throughout the 40 overs of the match, Pandya looked with no clue how to control the SRH storm at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium, Hyderabad.
With two back-to-back loses, Hardik Pandya has faced brickbats from the cricket fraternity. Among them was former Indian all-rounder and cricket commentator Irfan Pathan, who came down heavily on the Mumbai Indians skipper's approach.
From bowling changes to his own batting approach, Pandya has been criticised by MI fans as well as experts. "The captaincy of Hardik Pandya has been ordinary to say the least. Keeping Bumrah away for too long when the carnage was on was beyond my understanding," Pathan posted on X(formerly Twitter).
MI skipper Pandya gave a single over to his frontline pacer Jasprit Bumrah till the 12th over of SRH innings, at a time when the team in orange and black had already made 173 runs. Bumrah turned out to be the best among all in the Mumbai bowling line-up and gave runs at an economy rate of 9 when almost all other leaked runs at around 15.
In another post on X, Irfan Pathan slammed Pandya for his batting approach as well. "If the whole team is playing with the strike rate of 200, Captain can't bat with the batting strike rate of 120," Pathan said.
Mumbai Indians looked motivated to chase the whopping target. The team even got to a flying start with Rohit Sharma and Ishan Kishan firing shots in all parts of the ground. Later Tilak Verma also joined the party. However, MI started leaning behind when Hardik Pandya went slow and was unable to connect after hitting 11 runs off his first 3 balls. The skipper ended up with just 24 off 20 balls when he got out. Pandya scored at a strike-rate of 120, which was the lowest for any of the Mumbai Indian batters who batted yesterday.
Talking about the match which saw a plethora of records breaking, Sunrisers Hyderabad won their first match in the 17th season of the cash-rich Indian Premier League(IPL). It was raining fours and sixes as SRH posted the highest-ever IPL total of 277/3. Heinrich Klaasen was the chief architect of the destruction with a knock of unbeaten 80 runs while Travis Head and Abhishek Sharma chipped in with crucial contributions.
In the second innings, Sunrisers Hyderabad bowlers held their nerves despite brisk hitting by Mumbai Indians batters. MI eventually fell short by 31 runs.
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