Former Australian cricket team batter Matthew Hayden was left fuming over Lucknow Super Giants’ batting performance against Sunrisers Hyderabad during their IPL 2024 match on Wednesday. LSG failed to accelerate despite losing just 4 wickets during their innings and ended up scoring just 165 runs in 20 overs. In response, Travis Head and Abhishek Sharma took the LSG bowlers to the cleaners as SRH marched on to victory in just 9.4 overs. Hayden said on commentary that someone needs to show intent for LSG and after having one of the slowest powerplays, they just never recovered and ended up with a score that was absolutely below-par with respect to the playing surface.
“I have to call them out. This is not a 5 runs per over wicket. Somebody needed to show intent. They had one of the slowest powerplays. That took the innings nowhere. When the opposition team has Travis Head, Heinrich Klaasen, your intention should be to go at 10s and over. 160-170 will never be enough,” Hayden said in commentary.
LSG captain KL Rahul was “lost of words” after the carnage from the SRH batters.
“Am lost for words. We have watched that kind of batting on tv. But this is unreal batting. Everything seemed to find the middle of the bat. Kudos to their skills. They have worked hard on their six hitting skills. They didn’t give us a chance to know what the pitch played in the second innings.”
“Was hard to stop them as they teed off from ball one. Once you are on the losing side, there are questions marks on the decisions taken. We were 40-50 runs short. When we lost wickets in the powerplay, we couldn’t get any momentum. Ayush and Nicky batted well to get us to 166. But even if we would have got 240, they could have chased it as well,” Rahul said after the match.
