KKR also seem to have found their feet after a horror start in which they were without a win for six games. It remains to be seen if it was all too little too late but KKR do come into this match having won both of their previous two fixtures. For them to make it to the playoffs from here, though, they will have to win practically every match and then hope for other results to go their way. They may have played only eight games this season but KKR are already in a zone where every match they play is a must-win.
Pat Cummins: I’m going to live life
Pat Cummins has never thought of himself as a leader.
“I think for most of my life I’ve always been the youngest person in the room. I never really felt like a leader at all,” he told Elizabeth Day on her podcast How to Fail.
Then Australia asked him to captain the Test side in November 2021. Then he won the World Test Championship. Then the 2023 ODI World Cup. Then SRH handed him their IPL franchise and he turned them into one of the most watchable teams in the tournament’s history, liberating a batting order that had forgotten it was allowed to swing.
Abhishek Sharma, the main beneficiary of what followed, put it plainly on the YouTube show Breakfast with Champions: “Marte hue out hona chahiye, darte hue nahi. I am fine with the team being 100 all out, but I don’t want safe scores of 160 or 170.”
That was Cummins speaking through Sharma. The captain who didn’t seek the role, expressing it through the batter who most completely understood it. READ MORE
