The following few sentences will be typed using only one hand. The other one is held up in apology already.
You can't confuse Travishek by asking them to be watchful and then expect the kind of domination they displayed to take Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) to the final of the last IPL. Still, perhaps there is a case to be made for them to give themselves a bit of a sighter when they come up against Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) again.
KKR because they have not only beaten SRH five matches in a row, but they are the one team that Travishek have a 100% failure rate against. They have opened three times against KKR, and have both been dismissed in the first two overs on all three occasions.
To go with Mitchell Starc's brilliance last year and Harshit Rana's execution of a brilliant plan in this game, Vaibhav Arora has been the one constant in SRH's struggles against KKR. He is just the kind of bowler that can get mis-hits out of Travis Head and Abhishek Sharma when they feel obligated to hit every delivery. He is not quick, swings the ball only one way, but hardly ever leaves the good length and keeps taking the ball away from the left-hand batters.
Head has shown in longer formats that he doesn't quite carry an inordinate weakness against this kind of bowling. It is when he gets ultra-aggressive that he can leave himself susceptible. In this game, when he managed a boundary off the first ball, he wasn't entirely in control. He was early into the shot, but the check-drive lobbed straight over mid-off. He went harder next ball. Arora to Head in T20s: W, 4, W.
To be fair to Head, these three balls include one dismissal to a defensive shot as well, but he will want to perhaps just face a few more balls from Arora before he starts taking him down.
Abhishek has faced more of Arora, but hasn't been able to get the swing bowler away. In 22 balls from Arora, all inside the powerplay, he has scored just 17 runs, and has played six false shots. He has tried to hit only four of them for a boundary. So there is no guarantee that if Head does give himself a sighter against Arora, the results will change. Arora can continue to bowl wicket-taking lengths because he knows that even if he gets hit around, KKR's two great T20 spinners can pull things back in their eight overs.
In this game, Abhishek faced only one ball from Arora. That's because Harshit was superb in following through with the plan of bowling wide slower balls to Abhishek even with the new ball. This was the sixth time he has got out to wide slower balls in 36 attempts. It was obvious that he was late to pick it when he actually left the first one alone after shaping to back away and hit. Perhaps he didn't expect two in a row, and cleared the front leg and swung again. Only to be caught at slip.
Chris Gayle, perhaps the greatest T20 batter of all time, is a good example of how to occasionally play out certain bowlers. When he scored 175, he played out Bhuvneshwar Kumar's new-ball spell.
Pat Cummins, SRH's captain, knows this is a tricky issue to address because you still want the batters to think aggressively all the time, you still don't want them going in thinking what if they fail. "I think you gotta be realistic," he said at the post-match presentation. "Three games in a row, and it hasn't come off for us, but it was only less than two weeks ago that we did put on 280. So I think you talk about options. I still think our batters are at their best when they're taking the game on, but of course you talk about, 'Could you have taken a different option in those situations?'"
Cummins said they would talk about it but not "dwell" on it. Might a part of the discussion be the possibility of all the talk of 300 getting to their heads and them losing sight of the first pursuit: assess the pitch and post above-par scores?
With three losses in the first four games, SRH will have done well to stay alive by the time they come up against Arora and KKR again, on May 10 in Hyderabad, by which time they will have only two games left in the league stage. It will be fascinating to see how they approach the first two overs.