Sunrisers Hyderabad skipper Pat Cummins lauded rookie batter Nitish Kumar Reddy after their two-run win against Punjab Kings at the Maharaja Yadavindra Singh International Cricket Stadium, Mullanpur, Chandigarh on Tuesday.
SRH got off to a poor start, losing three wickets in the Powerplay overs, and found themselves reeling at 39-3 after five overs. Their hopes of posting a par score on the board suffered a huge blow when in-form Heinrcih Klaasen was dismissed by Harshal Patel. However, Nitish Kumar Reddy single-handedly took the visitors to a par score of 182 runs after scoring 64 off 37 balls.
Reddy scored four fours and five maximums in his blistering knock while playing only his fourth IPL match.
Pat Cummins said in the post-match presentation, “He was awesome, fantastic, debuted last week. Straight up to top of the order this week. He was fantastic in the field, bowled three overs. To get us to 180 basically off his own bat was unreal.”
Cummins added they were happy to get 180 runs on the board after a poor start. On the other hand, SRH bowlers were also right on the money in the Powerplay overs with Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Pat Cummins taking two and one wicket respectively.
Ashutosh Sharma and Shashank Singh gave a ray of hope to PBKS but SRH had just enough in the bank to bag all two points.
Cummins added, “Was a great game of cricket, they bowled really well at the start, we did well to get to 180, did pretty well to defend but got pretty close. The beauty of the Impact Player is you feel like you’ve got really deep batting. Always tried to be really positive to take the game on. It was really tough early on, they bowled exceptionally with the new ball. You got to be aggressive. With 150 or 160, you are probably going to lose nine out of ten games anyway. We knew that the new ball was going to be key. We were pretty happy to get to 180.”
He concluded, “Maybe conditions (on him taking the new ball), didn’t think I was going to do that coming into the game. We saw what happened with the new ball for them. Bhuvi and I started off, tried to take a couple of wickets. Beauty is we’ve got plenty of left-armers, right-armers, so you just try and give them the best chance of success.”
Sunrisers Hyderabad will next take on Royal Challengers Bengaluru at the M.Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru on Monday.
