Srinagar: Sunrisers Hyderabad skipper Pat Cummins has blamed his fielding and batting for the defeat against Kolkata Knight Riders in IPL and has said that bowling wasn’t bad.
SRH suffered 80-run defeat against KKR in Kolkata on Thursday. It was SRH’s third consecutive defeat in the IPL 2025, leaving them searching for answers.
“Not a great time. I think this was gettable, a pretty good wicket. Left too many in the field and then fell well short in the end,” Pat Cummins said after the match.
“We need to be realistic, three games in a row it hasn’t come off for us. We need to maybe look back at whether we could have chosen better options. Our batters are best when they take the game on, but looking back, maybe we could have taken different options,” he further said.
“It was mainly our fielding; overall, bowling wasn’t bad. We should have taken a few catches and stopped them a bit earlier,” Cummins admitted.
On the decision to leave out leg-spinner Adam Zampa, the SRH skipper explained that the conditions didn’t favor spin.
“We only bowled three overs of spin, the ball wasn’t gripping for us too. So we opted to go without him,” he said.
“I will probably address it on whether we could have used different options, but I don’t want to dwell too much on it. We go back to a venue we know so well now,” he concluded.
Meanwhile SRH won the toss and fielded first. Their decision seemed to pay off when they sent Quinton de Kock and Sunil Narine for single-digits, reducing KKR to 16/2, but a counter-attack by Rahane (38 in 27 balls, with a four and four sixes) and Raghuvanshi (50 in 32 balls, with five fours and two sixes) brought them back into the game. After the quick loss of these two stars, Venkatesh Iyer (60 in 29 balls, with seven fours and three sixes) and Rinku Singh (32* in 17 balls, with four boundaries and a six) powered KKR to 200/6 in their 20 overs with a 91-run stand for the fifth wicket.
Mohammed Shami (1/29) and Harshal Patel (1/43) were top wicket-takers for SRH.
During the run-chase, SRH was never truly in the match and lost wickets at rapid rate. Vaibhav Arora (3/29) and Varun Chakravarthy (3/22) stood out as only Heinrich Klaasen (33 in 21 balls, with two fours and two sixes) and Kamindu Mendis (27 in 20 balls, with a four and two sixes) could cross the 20-run mark.