In our pre-match preview, Orange Army Vs A Pink Genius: Who’ll Decide The SRH-RR IPL 2026 Eliminator, we discussed how overly reliant the Rajasthan Royals have been on Vaibhav Sooryavanshi and Jofra Archer,
and how Sunrisers Hyderabad reached the same stage the ‘correct’ way, with impact distributed across the first 11.
Unfortunately for Pat Cummins’ men, it played out exactly that way in the knockout match. Sooryavanshi played one of the best knocks in IPL history, scoring 97 off 29, and Archer uprooted the entire SRH top-order with a spell of 3/58.
When SRH turn around to take a stock of this season, finding areas to improve upon, they won’t find much apart from positives. They had three batters in the top-10 run-scorers of the season, the most in the season so far, while two of their bowlers made it to the top-15 wicket-takers; only Gujarat Titans (GT) had more.
SRH started the tournament with its best available 11. But when it resulted in three losses from the first four games, the management wasn’t cocky to stick with it.
IPL 2026 | Schedule | Results | Orange Cap | Purple Cap
Unlike some other teams, the team took a step back and introduced two young pacers in Praful Hinge and Sakib Hussain. It resulted in a five-match winning streak with five different Players of the Match.
Cummins and Ishan Kishan fed off each other, and neither captaincy came in the way of SRH’s success. The two shared the SRH’s last three match-winning performances.
Perhaps it was missing Cummins in the initial games where it went wrong, or it was Kishan losing six tosses on the trot at the start, but the margins were tiny at the end. The difference between them and arguably the best team of the last two years, the Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) — and so playing Qualifier 1 and Eliminator — was a net run-rate of 0.171.
RR showed that individual superstars can taper over all cracks. However, while they are now being requited for showing trust in Sooryavanshi last year, SRH have done the same in their for-the-collective-good style this season, putting faith in almost a whole 11 of youngsters throughout the course of the season.
Smaran Ravichandran, Harsh Dubey, Shivang Kumar, Salill Arora, Aniket Verma, Hinge and Sakib are all potential future superstars who have tasted substantial IPL success this year. Then there are the likes of Krains Fuletra and Onkar Tarmale also waiting in the wings.
SRH don’t need any of them to be the next Sooryavanshi, but even a couple of realising their potential next season would be enough to take them over the line.
“I don’t think it went wrong [at all],” SRH assistant coach James Franklin said in reply to a News18 CricketNext query after the RR match. “We won nine out of 14 round-robin games. We ended up third on the table, separated only by net run rate. Overall, we’ve had a really good season. We’ve seen the emergence of some young players — tonight, Shivang, Praful Hinge, Sakib Hassam, Salil Arora, and Smaran. That’s five in our starting eleven who’ve come in this year, which is great. That’s what you want as a franchise: young talent coming through every year, along with your senior contributors,” he said.
Franklin praised the SRH batting top-four, and reserved special adulation for Nitish Kumar Reddy for being the glue of the team.
“So overall, not a lot’s gone wrong. Like every team, you go away from the tournament and reflect,” he summarised. “There’s a lot of time now before the next IPL, when you start to think about who you retain, and there’ll be another auction. Every team will probably make changes, try to refine, and make their squads better. But as it sits right now, at the very finish of the tournament for us, I think we’ve had a really good tournament.”
