New Delhi, Apr 19: Both Delhi Capitals and Sunrisers Hyderabad come into Saturday’s clash at the Arun Jaitley Stadium on the back of contrasting wins. While the DC bowlers impressed to skittle out Gujarat Titans for just 89, SRH’s batters posted a gigantic 287/3 against Royal Challengers Bengaluru.
All of this signals that the clash to watch out for will be between DC’s bowlers, who have picked 13 scalps in Power-play, and SRH’s batters, who have a run rate of 10.81, the best amongst all teams in the competition. With DC returning to play at their original home ground for the first time in IPL 2024, head coach Ricky Ponting has promised that his team’s bowling department will go after SRH’s top-order batters from the word go.
“We’ve done all our planning today. We’ve got some very clear plans in place to rule their batsmen. First and foremost, how are we going to get them out? I think one thing you can’t afford to do against batting lineups like this is just get too defensive straight away. If you get defensive, that’s what they want. So we’re going to go after all their top-order batsmen, no doubt about it.”
“We’ll go after them with the right matchups and we’ll hit them with some pace early on. We know the right spin matchups for their batsmen as well. If they come out and try and play the way that they have been playing if they lose two or three early wickets, then that’s going to make it really interesting and that’s our objective with the new ball.”
“Generally here in Delhi, it does do something with the new ball. There’ll be some swing. There is a little bit of extra grass on the wicket this year. So there might be some seam movement early on. So we’ll be meeting fire with fire. We know the way that they’re going to play and we know the way that we’re going to get them out. So I can’t wait for the challenge for our players tomorrow,” said Ponting in the pre-match press conference.
With Saturday’s clash being the first game at the stadium, it would mean that the pitch, despite the unknown element, will be a fresh one, offering opportunity for batters to get big runs and for bowlers, especially the spinners, finding slow turn and bounce. Ponting also said he won’t mind for a batting shoot-out to happen on Saturday.
“When we’ve been away from Kotla in the last couple of years, we’ve been able to score pretty heavily. We probably feel right now as well that our batting group are batting as well as any other team in the tournament.”
“Our approach in that small run chase last game was great. This year the lowest we’ve got is 167 and that was when we were bowled out chasing 270 (against KKR). So we had to go pretty hard in that game. But I think our batsmen are going great. We don’t mind having a shootout tomorrow. If it’s a high-scoring game against Sunrisers, so be it.”
“We know and expect that they’re going to play the way that they’ve played so far in the tournament, which has been going really hard at the top of the order with the bat and trying to post a big first innings total. So we’re happy to try and match them in that. We think we’ve got as good a batting lineup if not better batting lineup than theirs. So we’ll see how things work out tomorrow.”