IPL 2021 | We’d love to make minimal changes and have a settled side, admits Trevor Bayliss

IPL 2021 | We’d love to make minimal changes and have a settled side, admits Trevor Bayliss

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SRH lost their fifth game of the season on Wednesday

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@ IPL T20

Sunrisers Hyderabad head coach Trevor Bayliss admitted that chopping and changing is far from ideal and claimed that he’s hopeful of finding the right combination and sticking to the same for a sustained period. Bayliss further reiterated that Warner’s slow innings cost SRH the game on Wednesday.

Six games into the season, the Sunrisers Hyderabad have used a whopping 21 players, the highest of any franchise this edition thus far. On Wednesday versus Chennai Super Kings, the side made two more changes, bringing in Manish Pandey and Sandeep Sharma for Virat Singh and Abhishek Sharma respectively, but the move didn’t help as SRH were crushed by CSK. Injuries to the trio of Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Abdul Samad and T Natarajan have hurt the side immeasurably, but the SRH management, at the same time, have also been guilty of experimenting too much, not showing enough faith in the players they pick.

Speaking in the aftermath of the CSK loss, head coach Trevor Bayliss admitted that he would love to not make too many changes, and claimed that it was unfortunate that, in the Chennai leg, SRH made as many changes as they did.

“Something we wanna do is not make too many changes. When we were in Chennai there were too many injuries and you also had one or two guys not performing,” Bayliss said in the post match press conference.

“What we’d like is to have a settled side. We’ll do our best to keep a settled side where and when we can. I’m sure we’ll sit down over the next few days and have a look at the next match and the match-ups for that game.”

Ironically, on Wednesday, while the returning Manish Pandey played a fine hand, it was one of the long-standing incumbents, skipper David Warner who hurt the side immeasurably with his knock. Warner faced 55 balls but managed to add just 57 runs, struggling to time the ball on a surface that had absolutely no assistance for bowlers. Bayliss reiterated Warner’s claim and stressed that the SRH skipper’s knock cost the side the game, but also credited CSK for putting up a clinical performance.

“Davey would be the first to admit that he struggled to hit the gaps today; hit a lot of balls to the fielders today. With Davey that doesn’t happen, but tonight it did, and that put us behind the eight ball. But the other guys batted really well. Unfortunately 171 wasn’t enough but I thought they bowled really well and, obviously, batted well.”

That SRH got to 171 in the first place was enabled by Pandey, who struck 61 off the 46 balls he faced. Quite flabbergastingly, though, the Orange Army had left out the veteran batsman in each of their previous two games, a decision that did not go down well with both the fans and experts. Bayliss revealed that the ‘selectors’ left out Pandey in the last two games in Chennai as they felt that his style of play would not suit the slow and low wickets at Chepauk.

“The selectors felt that that wicket didn’t suit Manish Pandey, with the ball stopping and spinning, and that he’d come back into calculations on a wicket like Delhi. And he showed tonight what a good player he is. Hopefully from hereon the wickets will be similar, because we know what kind of a destructive force Pandey can be.”

Almost halfway into the season, SRH are placed 8th and are in serious danger of not making the playoffs for the first time since 2015. Bayliss, however, pointed out how most of the losses have been extremely close ones and asserted that there’s no reason why his side cannot go on a hot-streak and win five or six matches in a row to make it to the playoffs.

“If you look at the first 4 matches, we lost all those matches by just 10 or so runs. It came down to a drop catch here or a misfield there or a poor shot or a bad over; there wasn’t a lot in those losses. Obviously tonight we got beaten comprehensively, but it’s important for us to not lose our confidence or patience. 

“We need to stick together and keep working hard as there are some good players in this team. T20 is a funny game, so if we can get on a roll one way or the other, there is no reason why we cannot turn it around like last year.”

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