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

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.

“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.”

“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.

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.