Vijay Shankar : Given SRH is taking me back after one year speaks about their confidence in me
IPL
Vijay Shankar, who was recently swapped by Delhi Daredevils to Sunrisers Hyderabad in exchange of Shikhar Dhawan, has stated that he is excited to go back to his old team. The Tamil Nadu cricketer has also added that trading him back to the team is a sign of the confidence that the team has in him.
In the SRH's Championship run in 2016, Dhawan was the most expensive player in the SRH team set-up, but with David Warner's subsequent emergence and Kane Williamson’s rise as a fine batsman and captain, the Delhite somehow became an odd member in the leadership group. While this “unsettled” him as a player, the inspiration further went down after his price dropped which eventually resulted in the team trading him for three Daredevils players - Vijay Shankar, Abhishek Sharma, and Shahbaz Nadeem.Â
While Nadeem and Sharma have never played for any franchise other than Delhi, for Vijay Shankar, it is a homecoming of sorts. He was a part of the SRH set-up and even came up with a couple of good knocks in the handful of opportunities that he had got in 2016 and 2017. And now that he is back in the team, he is all but sure to perform better than what he did last time around.
“I got a call from Delhi Daredevils CEO after the Deodhar Trophy final and they just told me that I have been traded to the Sunrisers Hyderabad. To be honest, I was happy because I was with the SRH team for two years and they have always been a pretty good side. For me, it is very important to go and adapt to it quickly and enjoy my cricket. They have been really good at that time I was there and I think I got some recognition because I played few games for them,” Shankar told Sportscafe.
“The good thing with SRH for me was that I batted up the order for them. The match I got the 50, I batted at number four. That is something good for me. If I
When Shankar was bought by Delhi Daredevils in early 2018, he had to prove a lot of people wrong after the flop show in the Nidahas Trophy final, but the opportunities were hard to come by. In the last year’s IPL, he couldn’t get more chances in the beginning, but once Gautam Gambhir stepped down from the captaincy role it created one space in the batting order and Shankar stepped in beautifully to fill the vacuum. He ended up with 212 runs at an average of over 53 and a strike rate close to 145 in just 11 innings. To go with that, he donned the role of the finisher and remained unbeaten as many as eight times, and for the success, he thanked the Daredevils management and especially Ricky Ponting, the coach.
“If you see in last year even though I played very few innings for Delhi, I think Ricky Ponting was someone who was backing me to play and do well. He came up to me and told in a few games I will have to take the team to the 18th and 19th overs and then take chances because we lost few wickets at the time I went in. He had a belief that I can hold the innings as well as can take on the bowlers whenever needed.”
