SRH vs KXIP: Hyderabad beats Kings XI Punjab in a low scoring encounter

Cricket News: Ankit Rajpoot registered his career-best bowling figures to restrict Sunrisers Hyderabad to a modest 132 for six, but however Hyderabad yet again showcased their magnificent bowling performance and defend the total to beat Kings XI Punjab by 13 runs.

Williamson, SRH skipper: We haven’t really played on surfaces that are 180 total. We wanted more from our batters and today 150-160 would have been a competitive total The Kings XI bowled really, really well, but the boys fought really hard. It’s nice to be able to defend this totals. We didn’t bowl well in the powerplay, but we did well to squeeze it towards the end. We want to be a little bit smarter with the bat. It’s about getting 145s and 155s on this kind of surfaces. Competitive totals on these kind of surfaces. The bowlers have been operating very well, they know their roles very well. We are fortunate with our bowling depth. Very lucky to have the local talent. Some good tough decisions to make going into the next few matches. You always want more, but the boys have been fantastic in the way they fought with the ball especially on this kind of a pitch. We want to maintain the same trend for the rest of the tournament. Yes! (it is a difficult surface to bat)

Rashid Khan: It was tough to come back after those two bad games (against CSK and KXIP). It’s a part of cricket, the team support was amazing, they just told me to go there and enjoy myself. I don’t know (about the plan to bowl him after the powerplay), it’s up to the skipper, whenever he wanted me to bowl, I was ready. Getting KL’s wicket was great, he’s a class player, one of my favourites, the plan was to bowl wicket-to-wicket, mix up my lengths. It gives a lot of confidence defending small totals, with our bowling – we can defend any total, the guys did a wonderful job in the last two games. The fielding was excellent, but we need more runs from the batsmen. The wickets in the last two games wasn’t easy, in the next few games, I think they will get more runs.
Ashwin – From where we were we should have really put this game away. It is disappointing. It was not the greatest of wickets and we succumbed to it. These losses can happen in this format and these sort of games do happen in IPL, we have to move on. We need to address our fielding. It is always difficult to catch under the lights but there are no excuses, we are professional cricketers and we have to put it behind and work harder. This 7 days gap is good for us, we will try to regroup and come back stronger. Rashid bowled really well, he is a world class bowler and we lost wickets against him in the middle overs.