New beginnings in Hyderabad

Match facts

Friday, April 5, 2013
Start time 2000 (1430 GMT) 

Yuvraj Singh will be playing in the IPL after nearly two years

After the top two teams of last year’s points table kicked-off the carnival on Wednesday, the bottom two will meet in Hyderabad on Friday. While the host city has a new team – Sunrisers Hyderabad – led by the same captain Kumar Sangakkara, Pune Warriors have a new captain – Angelo Mathews – after Michael Clarke was ruled out of the entire season.

 

Sunrisers will feel the absence of an in-from Shikhar Dhawan, who was Deccan Chargers’ leading run-scorer last season. After retaining 20 players from the Chargers, Sunrisers revamped their leadership, bringing together Tom Moody and Sangakkara, who had worked together as coach and captain for Sri Lanka. They also have overseas pace options in Dale Steyn and Clint McKay, and allrounders Darren Sammy and Thisara Perera, but only Steyn picks himself.

 

Warriors had an unsettled team last year and the addition of Mathews, Ajantha Mendis, Ross Taylor, Abhishek Nayar, and the return of Yuvraj Singh, will bolster their prospects. Steve Smith is more a batsman than allrounder these days and Warriors will be tempted to include Clarke’s replacement, Aaron Finch, who scored two fifties and a hundred against England Lions recently. With Marlon Samuels, Luke Wright, Wayne Parnell also in the squad, a right balance might not be easy to find.

 

 

Players to watch

Kumar Sangakkara scored 48, 63, 139, 55, 142, 105 and 58 in the recent ODIs and Tests against Bangladesh. He will now have to score in the shortest format against compatriots Ajantha Mendis and Mathews, among others. His captaincy will also be under the spotlight, because he led Chargers to only four wins last season.

 

Yuvraj Singh scored consecutive fifties in the Deodhar Trophy and took 3 for 39 and 3 for 19 in the Vijay Hazare Trophy, so his recent form has been promising. With captaincy off his shoulders, and having missed all of 2012, he will want to score more than the two fifties he scored in 2011.

 

 

Stats and trivia

• Both Sunrisers and Warriors won only four out of their 16 matches last season
• Warriors did not have a single bowler in the top-20 wicket-takers last season. Ashish Nehra, now with Delhi Daredevils, took 11 wickets for them and was in 26th place. Their leading run-scorer, Robin Uthappa, was 12th with 405 runs.

 

 

 

Quotes

“I am not looking far ahead. I am not looking at the semi-finals or anything like that. I just want to concentrate on every game, and on what we do in every game.”
Allan Donald, the Warriors coach.

 

“We have got replacements who are probably good enough to do the job and we are excited to give that opportunity to a younger guy.”
Sunrisers captain Kumar Sangakkara believes his team has replacements for injured players, such as Shikhar Dhawan.

 

Pattinson out of IPL for abdominal surgery

 

James Pattinson is expected to take four weeks to resume traning

James Pattinson, the Australia fast bowler, is out of the IPL and may also miss the Champions Trophy that precedes the Ashes after he was compelled to have surgery on what Cricket Australia has described as “a non-cricket related medical condition in his lower abdominal region.”

The departure of Pattinson to India for his stint with Kolkata Knight Riders was initially delayed until Friday as medical staff awaited the results of tests and the advice of specialists. However, on receipt of opinion that Pattinson should undergo surgery immediately, he has been ruled out of competing in the Twenty20 event, joining the national captain Michael Clarke on the sidelines.

Pattinson wishes to keep the condition private, but it is not believed to be serious, nor likely to affect his cricket future beyond the time required to recover from the surgery.

“James Pattinson will be having surgery tomorrow for a non-cricket related medical condition in his lower abdominal region that has troubled him during the latter part of the recently concluded tour of India,” CA’s chief medical officer Justin Paoloni said. “James has undergone tests and consulted specialists since returning from India, and it was felt that surgery is necessary at this time.

“The recovery times will [be] determined once the surgery is completed but James is expected to return to training in about four weeks. His preparation for The Ashes is not expected to be affected but his availability for the ICC Champions Trophy will be determined at a later stage.”

Warriors hope it’s third-time lucky

 

Big picture

Angelo Mathews will be Pune Warriors’ third captain in three years

 

Sunrisers may be the newest entrants to the IPLparivaar (family) but it would be Warriors who would be seen in a new avatar. Since their bottom-placed finish last year, a lot of water has flown under the bridge. When it came to running the team, it was a one-man army last year, with Sourav Ganguly acting as a captain-mentor.

Come 2013, and Ganguly is nowhere in the picture. Instead, it’s Allan Donald who has been raised from a bowling coach to the head coach. And for the third time during their third year in IPL, Warriors have appointed a new captain at the start of the season. Beyond the captain and the navigator of the ship lie the real changes. There are more than a dozen changes to the squad that represented Warriors last year.

Those who attended Donald’s half-hour interaction with the press would realise that their homework has been near- perfect. Warriors made far too many changes to their line-up last year. As a result, only one player – Robin Uthappa – featured in each of their 16 games, while a whopping 23 players got at least a game. As a result, the team combination was far from settled throughout the season.

This time around, though, Donald and Co have decided to downsize the squad for every game from 33 to 16, if not 15. And the thrust during the build-up hasn’t just been on adding match-winning overseas cricketers. As a result, domestic stars like Abhishek Nayar, Ishwar Pandey, T Suman and Parvez Rasool, who became the first player from Jammu & Kashmir to have been signed by an IPL franchise after impressive domestic season, have indeed made Warriors a formidable outfit at least on paper.

The coming weeks will tell us whether the line-up that looks as impressive as any other on paper delivers the goods on the field.

 

Key Players

He was the captain and the marquee player during their inaugural season and was forced to watch Warriors from the sidelines during IPL 2012. Warriors will be looking forward to Yuvraj Singh marking his return to IPL in style. Despite being the star of India’s triumphant world titles in both the shorter versions of the game, Yuvraj hasn’t really lived up to his potential in the IPL so far. Warriors would be hoping that the next two months help Yuvraj change that.

Once it was decided that Yuvraj won’t be considered for captaincy and Michael Clarke pulled out due to occur over again his back injury, Angelo Mathews emerged as the leading candidate to skipper the side. Mathews is already a vital cog in terms of the balance of the team, and his elevation has increased the responsibility on him further. Mathews would be hoping to draw all the experience he has gained from leading Sri Lanka in Tests and ODIs recently.

 

Big names in

The signing of Ross Taylor from Delhi Daredevils can help Warriors fill the gap of the floater they missed all through the last season. Taylor will be desperate to feel at home with what will be his fourth IPL team. And if the track for their home games is as slow and low as it was during the last year, Ajantha Mendis can be a handful with his not-so-mysterious-anymore spin bowling. Mind you, Mendis may be a familiar proposition for regulars at the international stage, but he can be destructive against the domestic batsmen. 

 

Big names out

Michael Clarke’s unavailability for the entire duration of the tournament is a big blow for Warriors. Though Clarke isn’t exactly renowned for his Twenty20 skills, he is widely regarded as one of the most enterprising captains in the world cricket. It is his leadership ability that Warriors will sorely miss. 

 

Availability

Ross Taylor is likely to miss the latter half of the tournament due to New Zealand’s tour to England. And Tamim Iqbal, who injured himself during a ODI in Sri Lanka last week, is unlikely to be available for at least the first half of the tournament due to Bangladesh’s tour of Zimbabwe.

 

Finch to replace Clarke for Pune Warriors

Aaron Finch will be joining his third IPL franchise after playing for Rajasthan Royals and Delhi Daredevils

Aaron Finch will replace Michael Clarke in the Pune Warriors squad for the sixth IPL season after Clarke was ruled out of the entire season with a back injury. Finch, another top-order batsman, tweeted the development and is expected to leave for India on Saturday.

 

Finch will be joining his third IPL franchise after playing for Rajasthan Royals in 2010 and Delhi Daredevils in 2011 and 2012. He was released by Delhi in November 2012 and went unsold in the auction on February 3 at a base price of $200,000.

He represents Melbourne Renegades in the Big Bash League and averaged 66.40 in eight matches last season, scoring 332 runs with a highest score of 111 not out. However, he scored only 4, 7 and 1 for Australia in the three T20Is in January against Sri Lanka and West Indies.

Overall, he has scored 1699 runs in 58 domestic T20 matches at 36.14 with a strike-rate of 130.49.

The Warriors will be captained by Angelo Mathews this season.

 

Clarke out of the IPL, saved for the Ashes

 

Michael Clarke‘s back and hamstring problems need rest ahead of the Ashes

Australia‘s captain Michael Clarke will take much-needed rest at home, and not taking up his likely appointment as captain of the Pune Warriors in the IPL, as the best remedy for the back and hamstring problems that bedevilled his India tour.

Clarke underwent scans soon after his arrival in Sydney and understands these showed that his back trouble was caused not by any new source but the same degenerative disc that has afflicted him since his teenage years.

Complaints of hamstring discomfort were also assessed, with no evidence found of a new injury, rather the accumulated wear of carrying a tender muscle through the tour after he strained it during the home Test series against Sri Lanka.

As a result of these dual problems, Clarke has been advised to rest and then train to strengthen his body and not linking up with the Warriors. It has been reported that Clarke may be offered as much as A$2 million to lead the IPL franchise after Yuvraj Singh expressed reluctance to be captain, but the risk of fouling up an Ashes campaign that may define his captaincy has been deemed too acute.

“Michael Clarke had scans that confirmed his current lower back injury is an exacerbation of previous issues he has had with his spine,” Cricket Australia Chief Medical Officer Justin Paoloni said. “As always, we need to manage this carefully as there are potentially serious consequences with further aggravation.

“He still has pain with basic activities and is not back to full function as yet. He also has a hamstring injury that has been a concern for most of the summer and will complicate his return.

“Michael is having intensive rehabilitation for both his back and hamstring but is still 7-10 weeks away from returning to training and playing. We are confident that it will not affect his Ashes preparation but will know more over the coming weeks.”

On his early return to Sydney following his inability to regain fitness in time for the fourth Test of an ignominious series on the subcontinent, Clarke said he would “listen to the experts” about his battered and fatigued body and his IPL participation.

“I’ll have scans this week and spend plenty of time with the physio, fingers crossed it turns out okay,” Clarke said. “Sitting down for 12 hours has made it a bit stiff, but I’m really confident that I’m in good hands with my physio here in Sydney.

“I’d be silly to make that decision [on the IPL] now, I think I need to wait on the results, listen to the experts and then make a plan from there. I’ve had my back issues since I was 17 years of age so this is no different. In regards to my hamstring I hurt it throughout the Australian summer and it has just lingered on. I haven’t had the opportunity to get that 100% fit due to how much cricket we’ve had.”

The national team’s coach Mickey Arthur, the national selector John Inverarity and the team performance manager Pat Howard have no formal right to bar a player from participating in the IPL, as the tournament’s span has been defined by Cricket Australia as a leave period. However they are likely to privately recommend various players of their preferences, as was done last year when Shane Watson was counselled to stay out of the event.

 

Watson admits batting form a concern

Shane Watson endured a lean series in India by his standards     Shane Watson has conceded that he risks being dropped unless he can  find a way to start scoring big runs again, after yet another disappointing series with the bat. Watson, who was the acting captain in the last Test in Delhi, managed only 99 runs at 16.50 during the Indian tour. This continued a long, unproductive batting stretch, where in the past two years he has made 627 Test runs at 24.11, and has not posted a century.

His lack of runs was even more noticeable during this series because he had chosen not to bowl to stay fit and string together as much cricket as possible after an injury-plagued couple of seasons. Before the series, the captain, Michael Clarke, said that as a specialist batsman, Watson would face competition from a larger pool of players for a place in the team, as compared to when he plays as an all-rounder.

“There is no doubt that I need to score runs,” Watson said at the end of the Indian tour. “As a batsman who’s batting in the top four at the moment, I need to score runs. Unfortunately, during this series I’ve scored nowhere near the [amount of] runs that I’ve wanted to, to be able to give to the team’s performance.

“There’s no doubt cricket’s a performance-based game. If I’m not scoring runs or taking wickets, then you can’t expect to be picked. There are no secrets about it. You can’t hide behind anything, apart from your performance. In this series I’ve not performed anywhere near where I’ve wanted to. I’m looking forward to being able to continue to play and hopefully get some continuity with my game over the next few months, and be in some good touch when the selectors announce the Ashes squad.”

Watson’s case for being part of the XI for the first Ashes Test will be strengthened by the fact that he is expected to be bowling again by then, and his medium-pace has a habit of providing breakthroughs at important times for the Australians. But bowling has also generally been responsible for the many injuries that have prevented him from playing even half the amount of Tests he could have.

He missed all the 2011-12 home summer of Tests due to calf and hamstring problems, and played only half of Australia’s home Tests in 2012-13, again due to a calf injury. However, Watson intends to slowly start building up his bowling workload during the second half of the IPL, and hopes to be in a place to bowl unrestricted during the Ashes, which starts in July.

“One thing I have realised is how much I do miss bowling, and it has been a plan over the last two or three months to get my body to a place where I can get back into bowling again, and hopefully hold together for the cricket we have coming up,” Watson said. “There is no doubt coming here as a specialist batsman has not worked out anywhere near where I wanted it to.

“It didn’t work in that regard, but in the end I am an all-rounder, I love being an all-rounder. At times it has been hard not to bowl knowing what I can give to the game. I know I won’t always be able to score runs or take wickets, but if I’m an all-rounder, I’ve got more [of a] chance to give to the team’s performance and success. I have to stay on top of my body so that I can play the amount of cricket I want to.”

2013 IPL Auction List

Clarke, Ponting get maximum reserve price

 

 

 

	Michael Clarke and Ricky Ponting are the only two players with a base price of $400,000 in the 2013 IPL auction list

Michael Clarke and Ricky Ponting, the current Australian Test captain and his predecessor, have attracted the highest base price of $400,000 each ahead of the IPL player auction, which will be held on February 3 in Chennai. The Australian duo form part of the 101-strong list comprising players from eight countries, which was finalised by the IPL on Wednesday and distributed to the nine franchises.

In addition to a host of lesser-known players mainly from Australia and South Africa – the breeding ground of Twenty20 cricket – the list includes seven Indians, two Englishmen and Kevin O’Brien, the Ireland allrounder who is the lone representative from the Associates. The list once again does not feature Pakistani players.

Though Clarke has not played for Australia in Twenty20s since he retired from the format a couple of years ago, he was signed by the Pune Warriors last year outside of the auction. Now released by the franchise, Clarke is expected to be one of the few marquee names to go under the hammer. What stands in his favour are his successful leadership abilities along with a strong batting form last year.

In comparison, the 38-year-old Ponting, who retired from all forms of international cricket last November, may not sell as an equally-hot entity. Ponting made his IPL debut in 2008 with the Kolkata Knight Riders, but in 2010 the franchise bought out his contract.

Darren Sammy, who led West Indies to the World Twenty20 crown last year, tops the list of first-timers with a base price of $100,000, and is part of the allrounders set. Ravi Bopara, the England allrounder, also has a list price of $100,000, the same as last season when he remained unsold. Another England player who was ignored last year, but has once again put his hat in the ring, is Matt Prior ($200,000); he is also one of the wicketkeepers available.

RP Singh and Abhishek Nayar top the list of players whose fortunes crashed badly last season. Singh, who was bought by Mumbai Indians in 2012 for $600,000, was released by the franchise after a lukewarm performance where he bagged 10 wickets from 11 matches and thereafter has failed to impress in the domestic cricket.

Nayar hit prolific form during Mumbai’s victorious Ranji Trophy season this year to finish as the second-highest run-scorer in the tournament. He was bought by Kings XI Punjab in the 2011 auction for $800,000 but the franchise opted to release him after a dismal 2012 edition. Nayar has now entered the auction with a reserve price of $100,000.

Among the overseas players, Johan Botha is back in the auction at a list price of $300,000 after being released by Rajasthan Royals. They had paid an eyebrow-raising $950,000 during the 2011 player auction to bag Botha, a move that seemed puzzling considering Shane Warne was still the leading spinner for the inaugural IPL champions. Last year Botha fetched a poor return, bagging just nine wickets and scoring 58 runs in the eleven games he played.

This time around the majority of the franchises have predicted a low-key auction, reasoning that they had most bases covered during the previous two auctions. “Apart from filling in certain small gaps, I do not see any big action happening this time around. Also with the player contracts expiring after the 2013 season, it would be difficult to place your bets on any big buys,” a franchise official told ESPNcricinfo.

Even the trading window, which opened on November 19, attracted scant attention from the franchises with one formal trade registered: T Suman, who played for Mumbai Indians in 2012, shifting to neighbouring Pune Warriors. The second trading window will be open from February 4 to 15. Each franchise has a salary cap of up to $12.5m to spend on their 2013 squad, which can contain a maximum of 33 players, including 11 from overseas.