3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Rise and fall of SRH expectations
IPL is over. At least for SRH. Some other team will win. Probably Mumbai. Why? Because it's their app. They haven't won on their own app even once. And they also need a new headline after the Ambani wedding. So yeah… that's how I place my bets.
Now, sports journalists will say SRH was inconsistent this year. I disagree. This was the most habitual a Hyderabadi team has ever been. This is how we play when we have absolutely no plans of winning a trophy.
This season took me straight back to 2008 — great lineup, one huge score, a couple of centuries… and still comfortably chilling in the bottom half of the table. It's in our DNA. A tradition started by the Hyderabad Ranji team, officially launched by the Deccan Chargers, and now faithfully carried forward by SRH.
And hey, we still finished sixth. Above KKR and Chennai. We found joy in other teams' suffering — a concept I recently learned a word for: Schadenfreude. (Thanks, Trevor Noah.)
By the fourth match itself, we knew the pattern. So Hyderabad did what it does best — we moved on.
JCBs went to work on the HCU campus. Students went to protest. We shifted focus from cheering overseas players to chasing Miss World contestants. Instead of making a fan poster of Nitish Reddy, someone made a funny portrait of Revanth Reddy. Priorities shifted.
