Chennai: It was the poorest ever performance by Sunrisers Hyderabad in IPL final on Sunday, the team that also put up a great show by scoring highest ever sums of runs in the initial matches this season.
SRH’s gloomy outing with the bat in the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2024 final against Kolkata Knight Riders etched their names in history books, but on the unwanted side.
On an overcast night in Chennai’s Chepauk stadium, Sunrisers got bundled out on 113. This marked the first instance of all players failing a team to reach 30 runs in an IPL final across 33 innings. The highest scorer for SRH on Sunday was franchise skipper Pat Cummins’ 24 off 19 deliveries.
The most pathetic part of the side was it could not even play the 20 overs, but was out from the crease at 18.3 overs.
This was also the lowest total in the final since the inception of the cash-rich league. They broke Chennai Super Kings’ record of the lowest total in the final in the history of the competition.
The five-time champions held the record for a decade when they faced Mumbai Indians in the IPL final in 2013.
Chennai could only muster up 125/9 on the board while chasing a target of 149 at the iconic Eden Gardens, Kolkata.
Overall, this was the second-lowest total in their history in the competition. Their previous lowest total in the IPL was 96 against MI in 2019 at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Hyderabad.
It all started for SRH with Mitchell Starc expressing his quality with the new ball to put Hyderabad on the back foot through his opening spell.
He returned with a figure of 2/14 while Andre Russell, Sunil Narine and Varun Chakaravarthy combined well in the middle phase to pile the misery with Russell finishing with three wickets in just 2.3 overs, conceding 19.
Put to bat first, Starc with an outstanding opening over dimmed SRH openers’ hopes of forming a strong partnership. The Aussie pacer, who was acquired by KKR for a whopping price of Rs 24.75 crores, becoming the most expensive player of the tournament’s history, gave SRH a big blow as he bowled a top-notch delivery to remove opener Abhishek Sharma for two in the first over of the innings.
Sunrisers never recovered from the early blow and lost wickets at regular intervals. SRH eventually succumbed to a score of 113.
