KKR vs SRH, IPL 2024 Final: Pat Cummins Opens up on His Midas Touch
Chennai: Ahead of his team’s clash against Kolkata Knight Riders in the Indian Premier League 2024 final, Sunrisers Hyderabad skipper Pat Cummins remarked that his golden run as captain in all formats of cricket has to end on some point of time.
Cummins is a captain who lifted SRH from inconsistency, dullness, and poor home outings that defined their last two seasons or so. Having won the ICC World Test Championship, and ICC Cricket World Cup, and retained the Ashes series with Australia, an IPL title will add a lot to his legacy as a leader. With a T20 World Cup already under his belt as a player, Cummins could truly call himself the ‘world conqueror’ if he secures the biggest T20 franchise league in this world.
The Australian right-arm seamer asserted that he has not captained in the shortest format of the game before IPL 2024.
“It has been great. The run has got to stop at some point. It has been a great couple of years. I had not captained in T20 before this tournament. I did not know what to expect. It is quite fast-paced (in T20Is). Drawing on ODI captaincy last year, it (T20Is) did not feel too foreign,” Cummins said in the pre-match press conference.
KKR and SRH will be locking horns in the final of the IPL 2024 at Chennai’s Chepauk Stadium on Sunday. KKR finished the league stage on the top of the points table with nine wins, three losses and two no results, giving them 20 points. They earned a direct spot in the final by defeating SRH in the qualifier one. SRH got a second shot at the title in the qualifier two against Rajasthan Royals (RR) and they made the most of it by defeating the Men in Pink by 36 runs.
Both teams have been incredible with the bat this season. KKR and SRH have posted six 200-plus totals this season, the most by any team. SRH has crossed the 250-run mark thrice, also making the highest IPL total over, 287/3 against Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) while the KKR has done it twice. When the tournament is all said and done, it will be looked as something game-changing, something that could bring a paradigm shift to the way T20s are played and the credit will go to these two teams.
Kolkata Knight Riders Squad: Rahmanullah Gurbaz(w), Sunil Narine, Venkatesh Iyer, Shreyas Iyer (c), Rinku Singh, Andre Russell, Ramandeep Singh, Mitchell Starc, Vaibhav Arora, Harshit Rana, Varun Chakaravarthy, Anukul Roy, Manish Pandey, Nitish Rana, Srikar Bharat, Sherfane Rutherford, Dushmantha Chameera, Chetan Sakariya, Angkrish Raghuvanshi, Sakib Hussain, Suyash Sharma, Allah Ghazanfar
Sunrisers Hyderabad Squad: Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, Rahul Tripathi, Aiden Markram, Nitish Reddy, Heinrich Klaasen (wk), Abdul Samad, Pat Cummins (c), Bhuvneshwar Kumar, T Natarajan, Jaydev Unadkat, Shahbaz Ahmed, Umran Malik, Sanvir Singh, Glenn Phillips, Mayank Markande, Mayank Agarwal, Washington Sundar, Anmolpreet Singh, Upendra Yadav, Jhatavedh Subramanyan, Vijayakanth Viyaskanth, Fazalhaq Farooqi, Marco Jansen, Akash Maharaj Singh.