Are SRH too reliant on Travis Head and Abhishek Sharma?

A few bowlers awaiting their turn at the Mumbai Indians (MI) nets on Wednesday peered over to their right. Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) were into their training and two key batters were doing their thing. A mellow version of Travis Head went through several of his shots, just not with the free-flowing bat swing. In the adjacent net, Abhishek Sharma had a longish bowling stint with plenty of laughs - at one point he was adamant Abhinav Manohar was caught by one of the imaginary boundary riders.

No team has been as reliant on their opening pair as SRH lately. Travishek has batted together 21 times since the start of last IPL, and in 11 matches that SRH have won, they have scored almost one-third of the team's runs at an average of 80.1 and a run rate of 14.65. In the 10 matches that SRH have lost, those numbers dip to 14.5 and 8.78 respectively.

In SRH's first game of IPL 2025, against Rajasthan Royals (RR), Head and Abhishek added 45 in 19 balls, with Head scoring a 31-ball 67. That, followed by Ishan Kishan's century meant SRH posted 286 for 6. But in the four games after that, SRH's opening partnerships read 15, 11, 4 and 9 before the mammoth 171 stand that helped them achieve the second-highest successful chase in the IPL. While head coach Daniel Vettori agreed SRH's success depended on the opening pair coming good, he dismissed talks that their batting has been "reckless".

"When you look at what we've been successful at in the powerplay, I feel like that Abhi and Travis have just been able to play their shots and deal with any ball," Vettori said. "Because it's a reputation of aggressive play and all-out attack, when the dismissals do come, people surmise that it could be slightly reckless, but that's not the way I view it. It's like bowlers bowl well and you can't succeed all the time.

"I know how much thought Abhi and Trav put into their batting and how much they assess conditions, how much they assess bowlers. They know that when the ball's there, they obviously want to hit it, but at no stage do I feel like they're being reckless or anything like that, I think they're just very good players who have all the shots."

This season, Travishek has scored over 40% of SRH's runs in wins (at 13.93 rpo) and only 6.2% in defeats (at 9 rpo). No team in the last two IPLs has a higher variance in the average of its opening pair in wins (77.80) and losses (19.54) than SRH. The style of play Head and Abhishek adopt has a lot to do with it.

Take Head's dismissal against Gujarat Titans as an example. In a bid to score a boundary off a full ball on his pads, he flicked it aerially to midwicket. Or even in Abhishek's case against Lucknow Super Giants in Hyderabad. He pulled a short ball from Shardul Thakur in the air, fully knowing there was a fielder at deep backward square leg. A safer option would have been to play it along the ground, but Travishek wouldn't have had the success it did over the last year thinking like that.

"People have done some good research around the amount of false shots they've had leading to wickets and it's a very high rate," Vettori said. "Normally batsmen get away with those sorts of things. I think there's an element of luck. I mean Abhishek got run-out early on. There's an element of teams scouting very well. There's an element of understanding of how those two are going to go about it.

"All that combines to a couple of performances where we didn't get the runs that we used to get from them. And our opening partnership has been critical to our success and the two games that we won so far, they've been big contributors. So I think there's two sides to it, obviously we want them to do well, but if they don't, then there's responsibilities on others to step up."