When you hear Rohit Sharma,you hear Mumbai Indians. When you hear Virat Kohli, you hear RCB. And when you hear MS Dhoni, you hear CSK. Same is the case with David Warner and SRH. Warner captained SRH to the 2016 IPL title, he has scored 4014 runs for them at a healthy strike-rate of 142.59, and he is very popular with the people of Hyderabad due to his frequent social-media posts around Telugu pop culture.
As captain in the 2020 IPL edition, he took Sunrisers Hyderabad to No.3 on the points table.The left-hander is also their leading scorer, having won the Orange Cap three times in 2015, 2017, and 2019.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t been his year. He started the season as captain, lost the band, then lost his place in the first half, and now in the second half he was left to cheering on from the hotel room as Sunrisers pulled off only their second win of the tournament this year.
On Instagram, Warner praised the effort of his replacement Jason Roy, and then went on to suggest he might be done for the season already and might not even be making the trips to the ground. That’s something the Sunrisers coach Trevor Bayliss more or less confirmed, but also provided a reason for Warner’s staying back at the hotel.
Head Coach Bayliss talks about Warner’s absence
“We can’t make the final so have made a decision that we want the young players to experience not just the matches but time at the ground, around the set-up, and for this match we made the decision,” Bayliss said. “He was not the only experienced player we left back at the hotel [Kedar Jadhav and Shahbaz Nadeem were the others].
“We have got to sit down in a day or two and pick a team and pick a squad of 18. That’s just the way it is. Dave is obviously watching the game back in the hotel and giving the guys support. It is the same as everyone else. We are all in this together.”
Will Warner play for SRH in the future?
That Sunrisers have dropped Warner twice in a season, and that he is not part of the leadership group strategizing at the ground, has raised the question whether this is the beginning of the end for Warner at the franchise. Bayliss said that was a decision to be made in the future.
“Look that certainly has not been discussed,” Bayliss said. “It is something that… this is the last year before a major auction. Those decisions will be made further down the line.
He has been a great contributor to Hyderabad Sunrisers for a number for a number of years now. He is very well respected with the amount of runs he has scored. I am sure he has got a lot more runs in him yet in the IPL.”
These are decisions that can only be thought of when the rules of the auction are clear: mainly around how many players can be retained and how many RTM cards teams have.
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