Bengaluru, March 27 Head coach Daniel Vettori said on Friday that the Sunrisers Hyderabad team management had little hesitation in handing over the stand-in captain's job to Ishan Kishan as he proved to be a "confident player and leader."
Regular skipper Pat Cummins will miss the early stages of IPL 2026, owing to a back injury.
“I think Ishan has been around in the IPL for a long period of time. He has been with several teams and has been highly successful, so, he brings his own confidence with him,” Vettori said in the pre-match press meet here on Friday.
“The fact that he has led the U19s and his state team, and they won the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy this year, brings a confident person, a confident player, and a really confident leader, and those are the attributes that we really looked at when he was appointed.”
“His combination with Abhishek is good; they are good friends, they know the team exceptionally well, and I really feel that these two will lead from the front this season,” he added.
This also marks a rare occasion when every IPL team starts the season with Indian captains.
More than this novelty, the growth of Kishan as a leader and cricketer in the last couple of years has added another arrow in SRH’s quiver, felt Vettori.
“I think he started last year when he was added to the senior group, and the leadership that he exuded throughout that first season, particularly in the back half when he took over the wicketkeeping, really brought energy to the group and set up our back half of the year, and we were pretty successful in that period.”
“So, when Pat (Cummins) was unfortunately out of the initial stage of the tournament, we had some decisions to make, and his (Kishan’s) experience with his state team had been so impressive, and then he was in really good form. So, between Abhishek and himself, we feel that we have a really good leadership group to lead us this year,” Vettori said.
The Kiwi said Cummins could return to lead the side in the next fortnight or so.
“His fitness has been exceptional because he has been out of the game for an extended period of time, so, he has had that time to work on his fitness, a real block of work around strength and conditioning. The only challenge for him was the bowling loads.”
“So, once he got the all clear from Cricket Australia to build those bowling loads, it is obviously a bit of a painstaking process to get his lungs up to where he feels confident and strong about bowling. Hopefully, we can get a definitive timeline, probably in the next 10-12 days, around when he can return to play,” he added.
But Vettori said they have good enough stand-in options for Cummins as captain and the bowler.
“It’s always a challenge when you take out that integral part of your team’s captain and fast bowler, but I think we’ve got suitable replacements, and I know Ishan is incredibly excited about the captain of the team, and we can lean on Pat the whole time until he’s actually able to play.”
The SRH top-order batting unit can instill fear in opposition bowlers, but Vettori said the challenge for the group will be to adapt to tricky surfaces during the IPL 2026.
The top four batters in Abhishek, Travis Head, Ishan, and Heinrich Klaasen can sustain the scoring rate north of 10 runs an over comfortably.
“We obviously know we’re an aggressive team, and we bat deep, and all of those players take the game on, and we’ve seen when we get on really good surfaces that that group of batters is difficult to stop,” Vettori said.
“But the challenge for us this year is when we get on those surfaces that are a little bit tricky, how we adapt to them, how we assess. I think that’s been a conversation point for all the batting groups around how to deal with that,” he added.