Sunrisers Hyderabad succumbed to their sixth defeat of the season last night (May 4), when they failed to chase 172 against the Kolkata Knight Riders. Among the factors that played a role in the defeat was a slight drizzle towards the end of the chase, and the resulting DLS implications.

Batting first, Kolkata had put up 171-9 in their 20 overs on the back of forties from Nitish Rana and Rinku Singh. In response, Hyderabad raced to 29-1 in three overs before losing two wickets for 24 runs and ending the powerplay on 53-3. Harry Brook fell immediately after the fielding restrictions were over, and at 54-4, things did not look promising for the home team.

The South African pair of Aiden Markram and Heinrich Klaasen joined hands for the fifth wicket to resurrect the Hyderabad innings. Their 70-run partnership threatened to take the game away, but Shardul Thakur claimed Klaasen in the 15th over, with Hyderabad another 48 away. The first signs of a drizzle were then seen when Hyderabad needed 38 in five overs, with Markram and Abdul Samad at the crease.

When teams expect a rain stoppage in the middle of a chase, the batters tend to keep an eye on the DLS par score as well as the eventual target. The former takes into account several factors, including, but not restricted to, the wickets remaining. This has an obvious effect on the strategy of the batting side, where they have to balance between taking the necessary risks to keep up with the required rate and saving wickets to avoid the risk of the par score jumping beyond reach at the present stage.

Hyderabad got caught in a similar dilemma against Kolkata. With 27 needed off 20 and five wickets in hand, they were ahead of the par score. Markram, after holding one end up for a long time, got out playing a ‘nothing’ shot, trying to forehand a bouncer over long-off. The drizzle kept getting heavier with every passing ball and minute.

This passage of play perhaps forced Samad and the new man, Marco Jansen, into minimising risk, as a stoppage in play seemed imminent. Losing another wicket at that point would mean conceding the DLS advantage. This resulted in Varun Chakravarthy conceding just five runs off the 18th over, leaving SRH with 21 to win off the last two overs.

Even at this stage, Hyderabad were a run ahead of the par score, but the rain delay that Samad, Jansen, and the Hyderabad management had been expecting never came. The drizzle was still there, but Hyderabad could no longer postpone their acceleration. They now had to switch focus from the short-term target of being ahead of the DLS par score, to the eventual target of reaching 172. And in that, they faltered.

Samad and Bhuvneshwar Kumar got a couple of boundaries in the 19th over off Vaibhav Arora, but could not manage the same off Chakravarthy in the final over. The DLS-fuelled cat-and-mouse game between attacking and being conservative eventually ended with SRH losing by five runs while being ahead of the par score for the majority of their innings.

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