BENGALURU: Sunrisers Hyderabad will be without their regular captain and lead pacer. Pat Cummins At least for the first two weeks of the IPL, the Australian players are currently working to get back to full bowling fitness.The head coach Daniel Vettori went on to allay concerns about Cummins’ condition, stressing that the pacer’s overall fitness is not in question.
“His fitness has been phenomenal. He’s been out of the game for a long time, so he has time to work on strength and conditioning,” Vettori said at the pre-match press conference on Friday.According to the former New Zealand captain, the challenge lies in rebuilding Cummins’ bowling workload.“The only issue is his bowling load. Once he got the all-clear from Cricket Australia, it’s been a painstaking process to get him to where he feels confident and strong about bowling. Over the next couple of weeks, he’ll continue his build, and hopefully we’ll have a clear timeline in 10 to 12 days,” he explained.Vettori praised the stand-in captain. Ishan Kishanwho besides enjoying the purple patch in the T20 World Cup, also led Jharkhand to Syed Mushtaq Ali’s first T20 title.“He was added to the group last year, and the leadership he brought throughout the season, especially in the back half when he took over the wicketkeeping, really energized the group and set up our back half. So between Abhishek (Sharma) and myself, we feel like we have a really good leadership group to lead us this year.”Vettori also said that three youngsters, led by Karnataka southpaw R Simran, are in contention for a place in the Indian XI. The other two players are Aniket Verma and Salil Arora.
