Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) ended their campaign on a losing note, going down to already eliminated side Punjab Kings (PBKS) by five wickets in an inconsequential final IPL league match on Sunday (May 22).
Batting first, SRH managed only 157/8 on a good batting track. But it was never going to be enough as Liam Livingstone made mincemeat of a hapless SRH attack, scoring 49 not out off 22 balls, and also hitting the coveted 1000th six of the tournament to the team's cause as the chase was completed in just 15.1 overs.
Meanwhile, SRH stand-in skipper Bhuvneshwar Kumar was satisfied with his performance in the IPL as managing his injuries became a "challenge" in an otherwise disappointing season for his team.
After winning five back-to-back games out of first seven, SRH lost six out of the next seven to finish eighth in the 10-team IPL table.
"As for me, it was a challenging season with injuries hampering me, thought I did a decent job and will look to come back better in the next season," Kumar said at the post-match presentation.
As far as season's positives go, Umran Malik and Abhishek Sharma's emergence augurs well for franchise, said the senior India seamer.
"We have had many positives, Umran Malik and Abhishek Sharma were the obvious positives, but we have a decent core of batting with Aiden Markram and Nicholas Pooran coming up pretty well," he added.
But he had a word of advice for the team management.
"We will have to look at our squad and the management will have to work out on the weaknesses ahead of the next season. We won five on the bounce and had the momentum, but it didn't go our way and we pretty much lost all our matches in the second half of the tournament." For winning skipper Mayank Agarwal, it was all about not being able to stich back-to-back victories.
"We couldn't stitch two back-to-back wins. We lost wickets in a cluster, and that at times derailed us. We have played an aggressive brand of cricket over all. We are going to sit and discuss now after the IPL. We were here to get two points and we were here to enjoy ourselves," Agarwal said.
