At the start of IPL 2025, Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) were a team to watch. They had the batting line-up that had struck fear into bowlers in IPL 2024, and they added some wicket-taking options to their bowling. They began this season by plundering 286 for 6 against Rajasthan Royals (RR), almost as if they had picked up exactly where they left off last season.
However, the spark SRH showed in that first game then went missing. The washout against Delhi Capitals (DC) on Monday (May 5) officially ended SRH’s chances of making this year’s playoffs. It was a cruel blow, because having kept DC to just 133 for 7, the Sunrisers were favourites to win. But even if they had won, there was no realistic chance of making the playoffs.
The batting failure
Abhishek Sharma, Travis Head, Ishan Kishan, Nitish Reddy, Heinrich Klaasen. On pedigree, nearly every other IPL team would swap their top five for these. In addition, SRH also discovered a bright talent in Aniket Verma, whose big-hitting fit in seamlessly with their batting ethos.
Unfortunately, all the batters seemed to collectively lose form in IPL 2025. If you fall into a rut in the IPL, climbing out of it can be extremely difficult. Absolutely no one would have thought that these five, who could all have been said to be in great form coming into the tournament, would all hit a bad patch together.
Much has been said about SRH’s overly aggressive batting approach, but this method took them to the final last year. And as coach Dan Vettori repeatedly pointed out throughout the season, it is not mindless aggression.
“If you listen to our conversations, we give the license obviously to Travis and Abhishek to play their natural game,” Vettori had said. “The rest of the line-up is simply about understanding and assessing conditions. There’s certainly no instructions from myself or Harish, the batting coach, to be aggressive, to just take the game on recklessly.”
The bowling mishaps
The way SRH have been set up since 2024, it is the batting that has to do the heavy lifting. However, in the IPL 2025 mega auction, SRH had a potent attack on paper. They bought Mohammed Shami, Adam Zampa and Harshal Patel, all wicket-taking bowlers. It was reasonable to expect that with these additions, the bowling would be more of a striking force than a defensive one. That chimed in well with their batting strategy too. However, Zampa was injured early and could hardly play, while Shami has not been back to his best since his return from injury. Both events were natural vagaries of cricket, but it meant SRH’s bowling was far from how strong it appeared on paper.
The pitches
The SRH batters are at their best when the ball is coming onto the bat nicely, and the pitches don’t have much juice in them. They can out-hit and out-bat any other batting line-up in those circumstances. But other teams got wise to that, and several times the pitches that greeted SRH in away games weren’t the kinds where you could hit through the line with impunity. That neutralised SRH’s batters considerably.
Crucially, even the pitches in their home ground in Hyderabad weren’t the uniform batting beauties they had been last year.
“This year the conditions weren’t as we expected,” Vettori said. “If you look at last year, there were a number of high-scoring games here. These surfaces, in particular, have been a little bit different. It has been tricky, hasn’t been easy for the batters. The guys are innately aggressive, but this season has been about trying to establish what’s required on the day.”
“There have been two surfaces that have been the 250-plus, and I think four have been more conducive to the fast bowlers, not so much the spinners. New ball’s been a little sticky, hard to hit, not coming on to the bat,” he added.
The structure
The Sunrisers still remain a fundamentally strong team. If the IPL were restarted after a two-month break, there is every chance that their batting would find its glory days again. The quality and pedigree are there in abundance; it’s just that the form wasn’t.
They might need to add a little bit to their bowling in the next mini-auction, but in terms of strategy, they did not go too wrong with the bowling either in the mega auction.
SRH may not have got the results they would have liked this year. But it would be foolish to write them off on the basis of just that.
