Hyerabad: What could have been a campaign to cherish turned into a forgettable season, but one with plenty of positives for Sunrisers Hyderabad. A nine-wicket loss to Mumbai Indians on Sunday consigned them to the sixth spot in the Pepsi IPL 2015 standings, but Tom Moody insisted his team had played much better than what the final picture suggests.
“I’m very proud of the playing group. We showed a lot of character to find ourselves in a position where we should have and could have finished second,” Moody, the Hyderabad coach, said. “You look at the last two games; the rain-affected game here [against Royal Challengers Bangalore] was gut-wrenching. And this game, we just didn’t turn up as a unit. We were very competitive. If we found ourselves in the ladder at No. 2, we would have given a lot of teams a fright right through to the final. The stars weren’t aligned for us in the last couple of days, the clouds were.”
Hyderabad needed a win to cement second spot and secure a place in Qualifier 1, which would have given them two cracks at the final. But Moody, who wasn’t willing to square the blame on two of his best batsmen — David Warner and Shikhar Dhawan — felt the inability of the middle order to fill the void at crunch times haunted them.
“David Warner is the leading run-scorer in the tournament and he’s allowed to fail once, and Shikhar Dhawan got a very good ball from Lasith Malinga,” Moody said. “Just when we looked like getting back on track, we lost a couple more wickets. We didn’t have the momentum that we have had in previous games with the bat. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.
“There were a number of players who got opportunities to step up,” he said without taking names. “Today was one of them and they failed to do so, particularly in the top seven. A number of those players, I’m sure, will look back on the season and reflect on the fact that they lost chances to do what some other talented players have done around the tournament and shown as standout players.”
Moody cited the examples of Shreyas Iyer and Hardik Pandya to drive home the point of what exactly Hyderabad missed during their campaign. “It’s just a case of players taking those windows of opportunity and running with them and playing fearlessly,” he explained. “When you see certain players that stand out, you don’t probably expect them to, like Shreyas Iyer from Delhi and the young kid [Hardik Pandya] from Mumbai.”
