4 min readApr 19, 2026 07:30 AM IST
Can international players keep up the standards in the franchise league after hanging up their boots for their countries? There have been contrasting answers to this question in the ongoing season. Lucknow Super Giants’ player Nicholas Pooran has been struggling to maintain his standards from the last few years; meanwhile, Heinrich Klaasen for Sunrisers Hyderabad hit the ground running and is the current holder of the orange cap with 283 runs from six games.
Although runs have been flowing from his bat, Klaasen’s strike rate has come under scrutiny. The South African, though, is more focussed on the job at hand.
“I know there’s been a lot said about my strike rate this season, but I’ve been putting the team in good positions, and I’m just doing my job,” Klaasen told reporters after the game on Saturday.
“I’ve been in difficult situations, and then you have to take responsibility and be mature about it. You can’t just deal with it, and that’s not how the game works. We get paid to do the job, and I don’t care about strike rate.You just have to be mature about it and find different ways of scoring ten runs an over and making sure that you still get a good score on the board.”
“If we didn’t do that, we probably would have gone 140, and the game would have been over earlier.I’ve been in a lot of situations where you don’t score in that first couple of games, and then start searching. So luckily I don’t have to search anymore, but I need to make sure to keep my form and make sure to start over again,” he added.
The South African explained how going to an “eye gym” in Cape Town during the off-season had helped sharpen his reflexes. “It’s all a personal programme for yourself, and it’s just a big tool to make decisions under pressure. It’s about a ten-minute session a day, and you make about four to five hundred decisions in that ten minutes under pressure, under a certain amount of time and reaction work,” Klaasen explained.
“I’m still keeping up with the pace of the game, and that’s kept me at ease. Not to play more cricket because 150 doesn’t feel 150 when you’re still seeing the ball nicely. When you feel out of sync, 135 feels like 150, and that’s not happening,” he added.
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Klaasen made a 39-ball 59 on Saturday against CSK, and SRH managed to get 194 runs on the board; however, the South African revealed he thought 220-230 would have been a good total on that wicket. “I still think 220-230 was a good score on this wicket. The wicket was really playing well, but I needed some batters just to come play the game, and I can take it a little bit deeper. And then we just said, if we both (Klaasen and Nitish Kumar Reddy) are in there until the 16th over, then we both just keep going. It was just a little bit to keep everyone calm, and just having some sort of game plan going into the next or the last phase of the innings. It’s as easy as that.”
SRH next take on Delhi Capitals in a home fixture on Tuesday.
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