It’s fair to say that the Sunrisers Hyderabad- historically, one of the more successful franchises from the last few seasons- have a rebooted look to their lineup this time around. Many of their core players from the past couple of seasons have either left or not been retained by the management, which left a large number of holes in their team leading up to the mega auction.
Thankfully, the SRH management did an impressive job in assembling 23 players, including reacquiring some familiar names, and now they are at a position to field a formidable playing XI. It does still require a good amount of deliberation to pick the best eleven players among all the options available, and so in this article, we’ll try to preview Hyderabad’s best playing XI in the IPL 2022.
The top-order
The Sunrisers do have a lot of variety in their opening department, especially with some of the overseas acquisitions that they’ve made. But for the best starting XI, we’ve gone with 2 uncapped albeit promising batters in Rahul Tripathi and Abhishek Sharma. The duo brings a strong right-left combination at the top-order who are both adept at making good use of the powerplay overs.
Captain Kane Williamson will slot in at number 3 in our team, and will be one of the lynchpins of SRH’s batting unit. He has the ability to play on multiple gears as per the need of the situation, which makes him the best suited candidate for the one-down position. Finally, in at number 4, it’s going to be the tantalizing and explosive Nicholas Pooran, who should also start as the primary wicket-keeper of this team.
Backups available: Aiden Markram, Glenn Phillips, Vishnu Vinod, R Samarth
The middle order
The hard-hitting Abdul Samad headlines Hyderabad’s middle order in at number 5. Given that he was one SRH’s core retained players, Samad will have to shoulder a great deal of finishing responsibilities on his young shoulders. At number 6, we’ve gone with Washington Sundar to feature as the team’s primary bowling all-rounder. While number 6 does seem to be a bit high for Washi’s usual IPL paygrade, if anything, his batting in test-matches has shown he’s a more than adept batsman to get a promotion in the order.
Marco Jansen and Romario Shephard slot in as SRH’s two explosive fast-bowling all-rounders in our lineup. Their finishing abilities is something that the Sunrisers’ management might have to take a bit of a gamble on, but it’s the promise of seeing two quality overseas fast-bowlers playing together that made us go with this combination.
Backups available: Jagadeesha Suchith, Sean Abott, Priyam Garg, Shashank Singh
The bowling attack
Thanks to SRH’s all-round balance, they already have quite a few bona fide bowling options in their batting order in Jansen, Shephard, Washington, and Abhishek. And to round off this versatile bowling order, we’ve chosen Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Umran Malik, and Shreyas Gopal.
There might be a case of dropping a bowler to accomodate an extra batsman in the middle order, in which case one of Gopal or Jansen might have to sit out. But we’ve gone with SRH’s tried and tested template of starting with a quality bowling unit, which is why we’ve given them as many as 7 options in the playing XI. Bhuvneshwar and Umran pick themselves as the leaders of SRH’s bowling attack, while Gopal will be tasked with bowling in the middle overs.
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Backups available: T Natarajan, Kartik Tyagi, Saurabh Dubey, Fazalhaq Farooqi
SRH’s predicted best starting XI: Rahul Tripathi, Abhishek Sharma, Kane Williamson (c), Nicholas Pooran (wk), Abdul Samad, Washington Sundar, Romario Shepherd, Marco Jansen, Shreyas Gopal, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Umran Malik