Rajasthan Royals captain Riyan Parag was open about his team’s poor performance in the powerplay but praised SRH’s pacers for their quality up front. He also praised the team’s batting depth, highlighting their recovery after a poor start.

This was the first time Parag was on the losing side this season; However, he has always seemed like a happy soul, even when he lost all his matches as captain in IPL 2025, before winning a couple of them.

Rajasthan Royals finally lost their first game of the season and after their poor performance with the bat against Sunrisers, they are still at the top of the points table. Sunrisers made a huge leap in the IPL points table and have now sealed a place in the top 4.

Sunrises rack up over 200 in total with Ishan KIshan leading from the front

Rajasthan Royals captain Riyan Parag won the toss and opted to bowl first, which did not seem like the right decision at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Hyderabad. However, they got off to a perfect start with Jofra Archer dismissing the most dangerous batsman, Abhishek Sharma, on the first ball.

However, Ishan Kishan set the tone for the innings, hitting an impressive knock of 91 runs while building two partnerships alongside Travis Head and Heinrich Klaasen. After Kishan’s dismissal, Heinrich Klaasen took the lead in the match along with Nitish Kumar Reddy.

The runs piled up and set a massive target of 217 runs, which could be the second highest total chased at this venue. Now it was the turn of the SRH players, who had failed to defend the highest scores in recent times.

Unlimited debutant Indian pacers have done the trick for SRH with the ball

Sunrisers Hyderabad have struggled to bowl well and have lost matches despite scoring over 200 runs in the competition. Sunrisers handed Indian pacers Sakib Hussain and Praful Hinge their international debuts.

Hinge took the new ball and miraculously hit it three times in the same over, breaking the backbone of RR’s batting order. Sakib dismissed Yashasvi Jaiswal in the second over, and then Hinge returned to dismiss RR captain Riyan Parag in the third over.

Down by five wickets in the 3 overs in the powerplay, the Royals had surely lost any hope of recovering in the game. They scored a respectable score with the massive partnership between Ravindra Jadeja and Donovan Ferreira.

Sakib and Praful finished with 4 wickets each, after the two players shared 58 runs in their 8 overs. Eshan Malinga picked up the remaining two wickets and they won the match by a huge margin of 57 runs.

“To be honest, there isn’t much time to process emotions.” – Riyan Parag

Riyan Parag spoke honestly about the results of the match: “To be honest, I didn’t have much time to process the emotions. We lost consecutive wickets, thanks to the way they bowled. There were probably some miscalculations on our part as well, but we will take this as a blip and not think about it too much. It was actually quite good.”

“I felt like bowling second could have been better, probably because we lost wickets early. It was a little sticky with the new ball while it had shine. Once the shine wore off, it slowed down a bit. In hindsight, we could have bowled second, but there are a lot of things we could have done better.”

“From a batting perspective, being five wickets down for nine runs and still reaching 160 says a lot about the depth of our batting. There are definitely positives to take, it could have been a lot worse, and we had a strong partnership there too. Like I said, it’s just a blip. We move on to Kolkata and look to do better,” Riyan Parag showed faith in his team’s strong batting depth.

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