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There wasn’t much at stake for Sunrisers Hyderabad when they took on Chennai Super Kings at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Hyderabad on Friday night. It was just another league game, with SRH hoping to erase the ghosts of their unimpressive past seasons and make their first IPL playoffs since 2020. Albeit not a giant step, but SRH did gain confidence from beating defending champions Chennai Super Kings at home by six wickets. Following the back-to-back home wins, SRH fans paid tribute to their captain, Pat Cummins, as they recreated his iconic ODI World Cup celebration.
One of the biggest reasons behind SRH finishing eighth in the table last season was their failure to transform their home ground into a fortress. In seven matches in Hyderabad, the side picked up only a solitary win.
However, in 2024, SRH already managed two wins in two matches at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium. In their first match at home this season, Sunrisers, riding on a sensational batting show from Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, Heinrich Klaasen and Aiden Markram, amassed a record 277 runs, the most ever by a team in an IPL innings, before beating Mumbai Indians by 31 runs.
In their second game at home, on Friday, SRH bounced back from a Shivam Dube onslaught to restrict Chennai Super Kings to just 165 before chasing it down with 11 balls to spare.
Following the win, SRH fans recreated Cummins‘ ‘shhh’ celebration from the ODI World Cup final against India last November. The picture went viral on social media. In another video that caught the attention on X, an SRH mocked the CSK fans sitting around him with a finger-on-the-lips gesture.
“Nothing more satisfying than hearing a big crowd go silent,” the Aussie had said as a cautionary statement before the biggest match of his career at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. And Cummins delivered it in the final against hosts and outright favourites, India as the crowd had gone completely silent following the dismissal of Virat Kohli by Cummins.
“We’re in a huddle after the wicket of Kohli in the final & (Steve) Smith says,’Boys, listen to the crowd.’ And we just took a moment of pause, and it was as quiet as a library, 100,000-plus Indians there & it was so quiet. I’ll savour that moment for a long time,” he had later recalled in an interview with ‘The Age’.
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