Why Sunrisers Hyderabad are the most attractive IPL team to watch | Ipl News

Sunrisers Hyderabad, the champions of 2016 edition, might not be the most successful team in the league, might not flaunt star-appeal like Mumbai Indians or Royal Challengers Bangalore, or wield the aura of Chennai Super Kings, have lost two of the three games this season, but when Abhishek Sharma and Travis Head brle out with their slick bats and attack-minded ethos, the IPL globe stops to watch them tee off, keeping aside loyalties and points-table stakes.
There is this feeling of non-partisan thrill that the Sunrisers Hyderabad stirs in the audience with their unwavering commitment to attractive and attacking cricket. Lend the eyes and ears, embrace the chaos and carnage, and a spectacle unfolds. The beautiful irony is that it has come from a franchise aligned with the city of Hyderabad that has traditionally produced styl virtuosos from ML Jaisimha to Mohammad Azharuddin to VVS Laxman. The city of wry magicians have turned into adrenaline-fuelled magnificent axemen.
The other night,  against Delhi Capitals, Abhishek jinked down the track off the first ball of the game, against the new-ball virtuoso  Mitchell Starc. He mustered just a single. He could have squeezed a single in any other way he could have. A tap to the third man, a nudge to fine leg. Conventional routes beckoned. But there is no fun in that, neither for the crowd nor, it seems, for him.

The strike exchanged, Head thumped the next ball through cover and the follow-up through mid-off for successive fours. Abhishek ran himself out the same, Ishan Kishan and Nitish Kumar floundered in Starc’s next over, in his pursuit of booming strikes. But the incoming Aniket Verma whipped the second ball he faced, off Starc, through square leg to get going. The exodus of wickets didn’t hinder either Aniket or Head from decelerating, as they continued slashing, slapping and scything the ball towards the fence. A cluster of wickets they would lose, to temper the aggression was the prudent approach, and they didn’t bat the full quota of overs, a criminal offence in this format.
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But if they find themselves in a similar situation next game, their response could be the same. They wouldn’t shrink to the shell of conventional accumulation of runs. It’s not in their nature, it defeats their purpose of stacking their batting order with free-spirited batsmen. The Kishans and Klaassens of the world don’t hoard runs, they hack them.  Perhaps some could react more pragmatically to certain situations, but the foundational principles would remain unshakeable. After all, the same methods had fuelled them to the previous edition’s finals. What worked for them as recently as last season wouldn’t suddenly backfire at the start of the next episode. It could be season-starting rust, or the burden of pressure from last year’s success, or just poor form.
It doesn’t matter. The two failures would not drive the crowds away or quell the anticipation when they bat. Rather, they would be all the more desperate to watch them hit the top gears. For, there is a romance in watching a team for the sheer entertainment they produce and promise, and for their capacity to render the result of the match secondary. A disclaimer, though, needs to be put that they don’t put fun before winning. But such teams usually fall short, often in heartbreaking fashion.
It’s the reason hory sometimes remembers (beautiful) losers too.  Like Brazil’s doomed romantics of 1982, of Don Revie’s Leeds United in the late 1960s, or Johan Cryuff’s Total Footballers in 1974, or the post-Invincibles era of Arsene Wenger. Or in cricket, Martin Crowe’s men in 1992, Brendon McCullum’s in 2015 and Rohit Sharma’s in 2023. The beautiful losers boast the most romantic tales too.
The ideals are not Utopian either. It’s the vision of the future, a whole new way in which the game could be played, except that it needs a coat of refinement and resoluteness. So even if SRH might not exhaust their trophy shelves like MI or CSK—that said, they have the ammo to deliver titles—they could be the precursors to the approach that would define T20s in the coming years. Hory would remember them as originals, and the audience that they thrilled and gave them memories like no others.