Sunrisers Hyderabad vs Punjab Kings, Round 2, IPL 2021
In the last match,SRH entered a rather unwished list by becoming one of the few teams over IPL history to lose seven out of their first eight matches.Safe to say, their playoff hopes lie on a knife’s edge.Sunrisers can only get to 14 points if they win all their remaining six matches.SRH is occupying the last spot in the points table and one wrong step can spell doom.
The only win for Sunrisers in this IPL so far came against the Kings and they will be hoping to emulate the clinical fashion in which they secured that victory in a bid to galvanise their campaign.Sunrisers will be playing their first game in Sharjah, they won two out of the three games they played at this venue last year. They were clinical with the ball in two of their matches in Sharjah, which potentially sets up an engrossing battle between bat and ball.
When: SRH vs PBKS, September 25, 2021, 19:30 IST
Where: Sharjah Cricket Stadium
What to expect: The IPL matches early in the 2020 season in Sharjah were loaded heavily in favour of the batsmen, with the short boundaries and flat pitches paving way for 200-plus totals with regularity, but as the season wore on the pitches slowed down. Considering that the SRH-PBKS match will only be the second game at this venue in the UAE leg of IPL 2021, the teams can gear up for a high-scoring contest.
Head To Head: Sunrisers have a clear advantage over the Punjab team, having won 12 times and lost only 5 games. Sunrisers have also won two of their last three matches against the Kings – including earlier this year at Chepauk where the Hyderabad team restricted the Rahul-led side to 120 before chasing it down in the penultimate over.
Team News:
Injured/Unavailable: T Natarajan tested positive for COVID-19 before Sunrisers’ last game and went into isolation along with Vijay Shankar who was a close contact. Umran Malik, a right-arm pacer from Jammu & Kashmir, joined the team as a short-term replacement for Natarajan. Sherfane Rutherford, who was brought in as a replacement for Jonny Bairstow, returned home following the death of his father.
Probable XI: David Warner, Wriddhiman Saha (wk), Kane Williamson (c), Manish Pandey, Kedar Jadhav, Jason Holder, Abdul Samad, Rashid Khan, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Sandeep Sharma, Khaleel Ahmed.
Facts about SRH:
– If Sunrisers lose this game, they will be only the second side to have lost eight of their first nine matches in an IPL season after KKR in 2009.
– Sunrisers have had a weakness when it comes to hitting boundaries in the current IPL cycle (2018-2021). They ranked seventh in terms of boundary percentage in 2018, 2019 and 2020 while their boundary percentage is the least among all teams in 2021. Sunrisers will also miss the services of Bairstow, who has hit 35 (20 fours and 15 sixes) of the 95 boundaries (63 fours and 32 sixes) scored by Sunrisers this season.
– Although he has struggled in this season, David Warner, who is set to play his 150th IPL match, has scored 943 runs in 20 innings against the Punjab team at an average of 52.39 and a strike rate of 140.12.
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