Sunrisers Hyderabad middle order is a work in progress: Brian Lara | Cricket News – Times of India

HYDERABAD: After back-to-back victories, Sunrisers Hyderabad were looking to build on the momentum in their home game against Mumbai Indians on Tuesday but faltered in key moments of the game to lose by 14 runs at the RGIC Stadium.
Head coach Brian Lara felt that there was not much wrong with the approach of his players as they were undone by a better team on the day. “Both Mumbai Indians and us were coming off back-to-back victories, so we knew they were picking up some momentum and I felt that today, they played better cricket and came out on top. We were up against a better team,” the West Indian legend said after the match.
IPL 2023 SCHEDULE | IPL 2023 POINTS TABLE
Lara, however, felt that there was some work to be done in the middle-order and added that it was a work in progress. “It’s (middle-order) a work in progress. We need to have guys who are thinking to take the game till the end. There are some great examples in IPL like (Rahul) Tewatia, (David) Miller etc. We do need that sort of person to understand how to calculate, who are the bowlers still to come and plan properly. We have been working on that a lot but we weren’t the better team today. We have to accept that,” he said.

Lara said losing wickets in the powerplay always sets a team back. ” I think we bowled pretty well in the powerplay. I don’t see a problem in that area. First of all, they lost their first wicket (Rohit Sharma) in the fifth over or so and we lost ours in the second over. Losing wickets always sets you back. The couple of victories we had against KKR and Punjab Kings, we had an opener batting through. Doesn’t matter how deep you bat, you want to make sure the right batters are getting the opportunity to score runs and we didn’t take that opportunity in this match,” the southpaw said.

“We seemed to be losing too many wickets in the powerplay throughout the five games we have played. That means you are always trying to play catch-up, trying to consolidate the situation to get better. We will have to improve in that area,” he added.
The coach felt that SRH were always in the game but lost too many wickets to get a grip on the chase. “We felt that we were always in the game. I think the pitch was 175-180 pitch. It spun and was a little bit slow off the deck. To get 190 was a decent score from Mumbai. We sort of tried to stay in the game throughout, but we lost wickets consistently through our chase. It slowed us down,” the 53-year-old said.