Visakhapatnam: Aniket Verma made a free-flowing fifty, but their excessive aggression and five-wicket man Mitchell Starc forced Sunrisers Hyderabad to settle for a woefully sub-par 163 all out against Delhi Capitals in the IPL match in Visakhapatnam Sunday.
Aniket (74, 41b) showed how to capitalise a smooth pitch with a wisely accelerated innings, but there were not many takers for that route in the Sunrisers camp after Pat Cummins decided to bat first.
The Hyderabad side’s beginning itself was flawed, losing four wickets in the Power Play that earned them 58 runs.
Abhishek Sharma barely heeded Travis Head’s call for a single and started late, only to see Vipraj Nigam’s underarm throw rattling the stumps before he crossed the crease.
Head himself did not last too long. The left-hander wanted to steer his Australian teammate Mitchell Starc (5/34) over the wicketkeeper’s head, but the feeble edge nestled in the hands of KL Rahul.
It was the sixth time Starc dismissed Head across all approved competitions.
In his previous over, the third of the innings, Starc struck twice to jettison Ishan Kishan (2) and Nitish Kumar Reddy (0) to reduce SRH to 25 for three.
Kishan tried to cut a pacy delivery but offered a simple catch to Tristan Stubbs at deep backward point, while Nitish’s pull off an off-cutter ended in the hands of Axar Patel at mid-on.
But Aniket held the stumbling SRH innings together through a 77-run alliance with Heinrich Klaasen (32, 19b) until the latter fell to a brilliant catch by Nigam off Mohit Sharma (1/25).
Aniket waited for spinners to come into attack and Axar was his favoured whipping boy, smacking him for four sixes in all.
The 22-year-old from Uttar Pradesh, who was dropped on six by Abhishek Porel off Axar, fetched his fifty off 34 balls, his first in a nascent four-match IPL career.
The right-hander scored runs at a strike-rate of 194 against the spinners, and was more cautious against pacers but still struck them around at 148.
Aniket looked for a hundred but Jake Fraser-McGurk’s athletic catch, which was a feature of Delhi fielding on the day, in the deep off Kuldeep ended his stint, and with it the hopes of SRH of reaching a bigger total too evaporated.
Later, Axar and Faf du Plessis too joined that list with stunning catches in the backend of the innings.
PTI
